


Revolution Lover, I'm Yours

by iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid



Series: The Great Unsnappening of Derry, Maine, circa 2016 [2]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Anal Sex, Coming Out, Fluff, Game of Thrones References, Gay Eddie Kaspbrak, Gay Richie Tozier, Laughter During Sex, Let Richie Get Lovingly Railed By The Love Of His Life It's What He Deserves, Light Angst, Light Bondage, M/M, Puppies, Sequel but Can Stand Alone, Slice of Life, Smut, TWO Count Em TWO Sex Scenes! Three If You Count The Phone Sex, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Top Eddie Kaspbrak, Weddings, Yes It's Vanilla But It's TENDER And That's What Matters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:47:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23378602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid/pseuds/iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid
Summary: “You come back to life, in asewer,and then you start having those weird dreams about turtles? I mean, that’s a pretty weird fucking coincidence, isn’t it? You think it’s connected somehow?”… Jesus fucking Christ.Eddiechosethis. And God help him, he loves it.“No, Richie,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I do not think my resurrection from the dead has any connection, at all, whatsoever, to the fucking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”Or, Richie and Eddie post-Unsnappening: A year in the life.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Series: The Great Unsnappening of Derry, Maine, circa 2016 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1681450
Comments: 62
Kudos: 384





	Revolution Lover, I'm Yours

**Author's Note:**

> here is the entirely unnecessary, incredibly indulgent sequel to my already ridiculously indulgent unsnappening fic because i have zero impulse control 🤷
> 
>  **if you didn't read the first installment, that’s fine!** just keep in mind that this is richie and eddie after hooking up for the first time and after richie’s confession of his Big Gay Crush, so it’s like an almost established relationship fic at this point
> 
> the first scene is out of chronological order, but the rest is. just a coupla repressed middle-aged gay dudes figuring out this whole “relationship” thing together yanno

Precisely three thousand, two hundred, and sixty-three miles away from the caves under Neibolt Street in Derry, Maine, exactly ten months to the _day_ after several thousand formerly deceased individuals woke up, lost and confused and dirty and bloodied up but _alive_ in those very caves, Eddie Kaspbrak gets the mail.

He fans himself with the stack of envelopes, squinting against the California sun as he closes the sliding glass door behind him with his foot. He steps out into the backyard and into the dreary mid-July heat, padding across the grass toward the lawn chair by the pool.

His target is entirely distracted, totally engrossed in his phone screen.

Honestly, a nuclear bomb could detonate next to Richie Tozier right now and Eddie is fairly certain it would not deter him from refreshing his Twitter feed for a single fucking second.

Eddie pauses. Considers his options. He thinks about covering Richie’s eyes and saying _guess who_ like they’re in some weird cheesy romance movie. He thinks about crouching behind the lawn chair and upending the entire thing — chair, Richie, phone in its waterproof casing and all — into the pool. It would be difficult, but not impossible; Eddie’s got the core strength for it.

In the end, Eddie opts with Option C: spinning around and falling ass-first onto Richie’s lap.

The move elicits a yelp, and Richie immediately loses hold of his phone, sending it end-over-end into the grass. 

_“Je-_ sus Christ, Eds. A little warning—”

“Stop reading tweets about yourself, Rich.”

Richie’s mouth snaps shut, cheeks turning pink, and then he lets out a defeated groan and sags down into the chair. His arms loop around Eddie’s waist, firm and warm, and he pulls Eddie close until they’re pressed together from hips to shoulders, all hundred sixty pounds of Eddie sprawled out and weighing down on top of him. At the other end of the yard, Penny finally seems to realize that _both_ her parents are outside; she hops up from where she’d been stretched out in the sun, dog tag jingling as she lopes over to the lawn chair and flops down by Eddie’s feet.

Eddie reaches down to scratch her behind the ears, and then props his elbow on the chair back over Richie’s shoulder, lifting himself up a few inches so he can kiss Richie’s forehead. “You good?”

“Mm-hmm,” Richie mumbles.

“Gonna stop refreshing your Twitter feed every ten seconds?”

“Mm _yep.”_

“Good,” Eddie says, then shifts around until he’s more comfortable, tucking his head under Richie’s chin. Penny stretches out again, so he rests his feet on her side, right over her ribs. “Who gives a shit what anyone’s saying, huh? You kicked ass Saturday night. You’re gonna keep kicking ass every night. Fuck the rest.”

“Mm.” A kiss is pressed to the crown of his head, and then Richie’s voice is accompanied by the movement of his lips in Eddie’s hair. “I dunno. Just feels like I should’ve done it differently, you know?”

“Hey,” Eddie scolds. “Fuck should, remember?”

There’s a second or two of silence, and then Richie huffs a laugh. “Yeah. Fuck should.”

“Now do you want to hear why I came out here, or what?”

“All ears, babe.”

Eddie flips through the stack of mail in his hands, bills and credit card ads and menus and bank statements, and he fishes out the one eggshell white envelope that he’s already torn open. Rather than move from his comfortable position, Eddie holds it up for Richie to see, giving it a little flourish to make it clear he wants Richie to take it.

He does. Unwinds an arm from around Eddie’s waist and snags it, fiddling around one-handed to open it rather than relinquish _both_ arms.

“Ooh, a _wedding,”_ Richie says once he’s gotten it open, his voice rumbling through his chest under Eddie’s ear. “Who’s…? Wait, hang on, I know that name. Why do I know that name?”

“Adrian Mellon,” Eddie murmurs. “He was in the caves. He was the one… you know, right before we got back to Derry. The last one before Mike called us back.”

Richie hums in recognition. He kisses the top of his head again, taking a second to read over the invitation. For a moment Eddie wonders if he’s gonna make a joke or a comment, something like _Don’s a bit of an odd name for a lady innit,_ or something about the timing of a gay wedding invite coming right off the heels of his show last Saturday, but instead all he asks is, “We going?”

“I told him I would.”

“It’s in Cape fucking Cod.”

“So I’m gonna cash in some of our million fucking frequent flyer miles, and I’m gonna go to Massachusetts and eat my weight in wedding cake, and then I’m gonna hop in a rental and go visit Ben and Bev and Bill and Mike and Georgie after,” Eddie says, punctuating the sentence with a yawn. This weird mix of city air and desert heat makes him so sleepy so fast, and Richie’s comfy as shit, as is Penny, so that doesn’t help. “You’re welcome to join me.”

“You asking me to be your plus one, Eds?”

“Mm. Who else?”

“Fair point. Can I wear my tuxedo t-shirt?”

“You wear that tuxedo t-shirt again and I will immediately rip it off of you and throttle you with it.”

“Ooh, promise?”

Eddie laughs, quiet and breathy, and he’s torn between the urge to smack Richie in the back of the head or kiss him senseless. Since he’s in position for neither, he tips his head back and quickly kisses him under his jaw, then settles back in again. “Maybe. Let me sleep on it first.”

“‘Kay. You gonna let me up to go grab my phone any time soon?”

“Not on your fucking life, Tozier.”

Richie sighs, long and drawn out and dramatic, but he doesn’t make an attempt to move. Instead he stretches his shoulders back until something cracks, and then he tightens his hold on Eddie’s waist and mumbles, “Y’know, I think I can live with that.”

At the beginning, after what Eddie continually refers to in his mind as “that time in the cabin,” at least for that first week following the Acadia trip, he thinks that maybe, possibly, they _might_ get a little too enthusiastic about this whole… hooking up… thing.

Maybe.

But— well, sue him! He’s _learning_ things about himself, damn it, things he never knew he liked, things he buried so goddamn deep after the clown and Derry that he never even knew it was there in the first place. He was fucking sixteen when he left and started to forget everything, the clown, his friends, _Richie,_ and who fucking knows if he even knew _then_ what kind of things he liked? Who knows! He might not have figured it out yet by then, and once the memories started getting torched he was never given the _chance_ to figure it out. He was never given the chance to grow up.

So, fucking sue him, he is making up for lost time.

And if that means they end up acting like a couple of teenagers over the course of the following week, well.

That’s their goddamn right.

“Oh, it is way too goddamn early to be up—”

“It is seven fucking o’clock, asshole, half the working world is up by now—”

“— and for _exercise_ of all fucking things, this is a new elevated form of torture designed just for me—”

“It’s gonna be a _light jog,_ dude,” Eddie insists, standing in the middle of the townhouse kitchen with his hands on his hips. “A light jog.”

It’s their first day back after the Acadia trip, and he’s feeling a little stir crazy, and he wants to go for a run, and fuck if Richie couldn’t use a little exercise, too. It’s not that he doesn’t have a nice body, because he _definitely_ fucking does, all broad shoulders and thick thighs and surprisingly muscled arms and— whatever. The fact is, Eddie does not even want to think about the state of his arteries. Has he even eaten a vegetable in thirty fucking years?

“It’s gorgeous out, it is literally perfect weather, and we can stop whenever you want, come on.”

“Mm. You gonna be wearing those?” Richie asks, with a pointed look at Eddie’s shorts.

“Wha—? _Yes,_ I’m gonna be wearing these. They’re running shorts. What about you, you’re gonna go running in fucking pajama pants?”

“Definitely an elevated form of torture,” Richie nods, stepping closer and crowding Eddie until his back hits the kitchen counter.

And Eddie, for half a second, can’t breathe. But it’s the good kind of breathlessness, like he went ahead and went for that run already after all. Richie’s looking down at him a little sleepily with his hair a fucking mess and his scruff extra pronounced and his glasses slid down to nearly the bottom of his nose and a little smile tugging at his mouth, and—

“Oh, fuck off,” Eddie mutters, tugging him down by the shirt until their lips meet.

Richie hums into it, unable to kiss properly because he’s smiling even wider now, and without preamble he reaches down and grabs Eddie by the thighs and hoists him up onto the counter in one swift movement. Thanks to the running shorts there’s a sliver of Eddie’s bare thighs exposed to the fucking _freezing_ marble countertop, but then Richie’s already inserted himself in the space between Eddie’s knees and he’s got his hands sliding under the back of his shirt and suddenly the cold doesn’t quite seem to matter anymore.

Because the thing is, this is one of those things that Eddie’s learning he really, really likes. He likes when their height difference — which he still insists isn’t even _that_ much of a difference, but still — is flipped on its head. He likes grabbing Richie by his dumb square jaw and tilting him up, he likes when Richie’s forced to look up at him, eyes all wide like he’s in fucking _awe._

Richie picked up on that pretty quick. He picks up on _all_ the things Eddie’s learning he likes pretty quick, and now he’s just about convinced Eddie to throw the whole _running_ idea out the window and replace it with a far more tempting form of morning exercise, with his hands on Eddie’s waist and his mouth on Eddie’s neck, and—

And at that moment, someone sighs in the doorway.

Like, actually sighs. Basically fucking groans. They don’t clear their throat, they don’t say, _whoops, hey, guys, sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt._

No, they just fucking _sigh._

Eddie goes rigid with mixed embarrassment and anticipation. Richie twists at the waist, his palms planted on the counter on either side of Eddie’s hips, and the two of them stare at—

Stanley, who’s standing there at the kitchen entrance all bleary-eyed and squinting and with the most serious case of bedhead Eddie has ever seen in his entire life. And that’s saying something, given that he’s woken up next to Richie Tozier every day for the past week.

“Morn’n,” Stan mumbles.

Then he yawns, scratches at his jaw, and shuffles right up to the counter beside them. He grabs a coffee mug out of the cabinet by the sink, reaches _fully around_ Eddie’s back to pull the tub of Maxwell House from the next cabinet over, wordlessly scoops a probably unhealthy proportion of grounds into the reusable filter in Ben’s nice fancy coffee maker, and fills the back of it with water from the tap.

Then he slaps the lid of the coffee maker shut, presses _brew,_ and turns away without another word to head out of the kitchen.

There’s a few moments of dead silence, with the exception of the gurgle and hiss of the coffee maker, and then Richie clicks his tongue and asks, “Bedroom?”

“Bedroom.”

“Oh, wait, so what happened to that jog we were gonna go on?”

“Shut the _fuck up,_ Richie!”

“Eddie. Yoo-hoo. _Eds.”_

“Huh?”

Eddie blinks out of a daze, shaking his head like he’s shooing a fly. He finds Richie sitting across from him at the diner table, peering at him over the rim of his glasses, which is _obviously_ for effect, since anything above the rim of his glasses can’t be anything more than a series of colorful blurry blobs. His eyesight was atrocious when they were kids, and statistically it could only have gotten worse since then.

Richie keeps them there anyway. “What’s going on, man?”

“What? Nothing. Nothing’s… going on.”

“Tell that to your fuckin’ trillion yard stare.”

“I wasn’t… _staring,_ asshole, I was just…” Eddie trails off, then huffs, then stabs a piece of lettuce with his fork. “Thinking.”

Richie waits, then pushes his glasses back up and starts cutting off pieces of his pancakes. Chocolate chip pancakes, which he ordered because, as he has argued no less than thirty fucking times, it’s a diner at four in the afternoon and apparently no one goes to a diner at four in the afternoon unless they’re hankering for some supremely unhealthy breakfast food at non-breakfast hours.

 _And yes, Eddie, before you ask, there exists a breakfast food outside of fuckin’ Bran Flakes,_ he’d added. _Live a little, holy shit._

Eddie has spent no less than half the time they’ve been here loudly denouncing Richie’s choice of meal, listing the risk factors for heart disease, listing the risk factors for diabetes, trying and failing to physically wrestle the syrup from him, and finally falling back into their tried and true East Coast vs. West Coast debate and insisting that Richie probably doesn’t know _shit_ about diners because do they even _have_ diners in California?

It is, oddly, the most fun he’s had at a diner in…

Oh. He’s _never_ had fun in a diner. Right. Makes sense.

Of course, however much fun he’s been having doesn’t quite change the fact that there’s still the one little black cloud hanging over it all. Or at least a gray-ish black one. The reason he’d been so distracted to the point of Richie picking up on it and calling him out on it.

Eddie sighs, taps his phone screen, and checks his email for the hundred-thousandth time today. He’s been back in the land of the living for a grand total of one month, and the paperwork alone has been a fucking horror show of its own. Then he stabs another piece of lettuce from his salad along with a tomato, and he relents, “Myra got the apartment.”

Richie’s attention, which had been down on his syrup-and-butter-soaked monstrosity of a plate, rubber-band snaps back up.

“Oh,” he says, eyes wide behind the glasses. “Okay?”

“I mean, I— I gave her the apartment.”

“Did you…” Richie squints, “… want… to…?”

Eddie shrugs. “I guess? I mean, it’s not like I was ever gonna go back there. That place was— it wasn’t really both of ours in the first place, it was mostly hers anyway, you know? I mean, fuck, pretty much _everything_ we owned was mostly hers, she kind of made sure of that, but that’s not— Even if it wasn’t, even if it was really both of ours and not just hers, I don’t think I’d have… felt… right? Living there? I don’t know. It was the right call. She gets the apartment, and I get out of a whole lot of alimony, and it’s just… It’s better this way.”

Richie’s squint turns into a half cringe. “Okay, so… why do you look like someone just killed your dog?”

“I don’t _have_ a dog.”

“Okay, yeah, but if you _did,_ you look like someone just killed him.”

Eddie huffs again, rolling his eyes, and then he looks down at his food and admits, “I don’t know. It wasn’t final until today. And now I _officially_ don’t have a legal address, and I only have a _job_ for another few days before my vacation time runs out, and I gotta figure out whether I’m gonna go back there and keep working there or, like, quit the job I’ve been working for _eighteen fucking years,_ and even if I figure that out, I’ve been putting off figuring out where I’m gonna _live_ for the rest of my fucking life, because I’m an adult and I can’t just claim a guest room at my friend’s house and actually _live there,_ forever, and I did so much apartment hunting online and it never amounted to anything and… I don’t know. I think what’s actually bothering me is that it… feels weird? Not living there? I actually _liked_ New York. I really liked it. The city.”

Richie’s eyebrows shoot up. “Seriously? Even with all the…?”

 _“Yes,_ even with all the people, and the germs, and the objectively disgusting subways and streets and the fucking trash bags on the curb, and— yeah,” Eddie tells him. He bites his bottom lip for a second, realizes he’s doing it, and stops. “I just… All of it. I liked living in the city. I even liked _driving_ in the city.”

Richie lets off a low whistle. “You are genuinely blowing my mind, dude. You liked driving in New York City. _You.”_

Eddie nods, pressing his lips together in a tight line. “It’s actually surprisingly safe. Because even though everyone’s in close proximity and there’s a million cars on the road and everyone’s cutting each other off _constantly_ it’s like— it’s like, everyone’s going fucking two miles an hour anyway, right? So even if you _do_ get in a collision, and you shouldn’t if you’re paying attention, but even if you _do,_ nothing usually comes of it. I mean, look at me, I got T-boned at an intersection and I walked away without a scratch—”

“Well, your car didn’t—”

“Yeah, because if you do your research and drive a car that’s up to code and _safe_ and it has a functioning fucking crunch zone and airbags and—” Eddie cuts himself off, shakes his head. “Anyway. Whatever. I just… I think I’m gonna miss it, I guess. Living there. In the city.”

Richie bites the inside of his cheek for half a second, Eddie sees it. Then he looks down and pushes around a syrup-coated hunk of breakfast sausage, and he says, “You could still live there.”

Eddie bobs his head. “Technically, yeah.”

“Do you _want_ to?”

“Huh?”

“Live there again,” Richie says. “In the city. In your own place this time.”

Eddie freezes. “Um. I don’t… I don’t know.”

“Well, where _do_ you want to live?”

“I don’t _know,_ Richie, I can’t just— It’s a life-changing fucking decision, isn’t it? I can’t just—”

“Eds,” Richie interrupts, so heart-achingly sincere that it shuts Eddie right up. “Look, man, Derry wiped out that part of you, right? The part that actually lets you do the shit you want? The part that actually lets you _know_ what you want and, like, fucking act on it?”

Eddie shrugs. “I don’t know, dude. Derry took a lot of shit from all of us. I’m not the only one. It took shit from _you,_ too.”

“Yeah, and I’m fucking looking at it,” Richie says right away, and _Jesus,_ Eddie doesn’t know how he just _says_ shit like that right off the cuff. Heat immediately rises to his cheeks, and Richie definitely sees it but doesn’t comment on it. “And we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about what it took from _you,_ man. Seriously. You’re getting it back. You’re getting _you_ back. Don’t worry about where you’re supposed to go, don’t worry about your job, don’t worry about your ex, don’t worry about me, don’t worry about Ben and Bev’s literally boundless fucking hospitality, okay? It’s just me you’re talking to. Come on. What do _you_ actually want?”

Eddie gulps. He fiddles with his fork, sets it down, picks it back up and fiddles with it again.

Finally, he mutters, “I’m not what Derry took from you, Rich.”

“An expert change in subject, I’ll give it to you, fine, fine, I’ll allow it for now,” Richie says, nodding sagely and then pointing at him with a piece of pancake speared by his fork. “We are definitely circling back to that eventually, but you got me. Maybe not _you_ specifically, but like, hello? Forty-year-old closet case over here?” He waves spastically at his entire general being, flinging droplets of syrup across the table. “Derry made me forget, like, the only friends I ever really had, which includes you, and it made me forget— you know. That. Which _obviously_ includes you. So you, Eddie fucking Kaspbrak, are a pretty tight little summary of what Derry wiped the fuck out of me.”

Eddie hesitates. “Did you really _forget_ that you were…?”

“That I’m into dudes? No, c’mon, obviously not,” Richie says, like it’s just that fucking easy to say. “It’s not like I went three decades never looking at another human being, Eds. I just never really— I dunno, thought about it? Or never let myself think about it, I guess, who fuckin’ knows.”

Eddie tilts his head in agreement. “Yeah. Yeah, I get that, at least.”

“What, going three decades without looking at another human being?”

“No, dickhead, the— the last thing. Not letting myself… think about it.”

Richie nods again. A few seconds pass while he apparently mulls that over, and then he asks, “Have you said it yet?”

“Said—?” Eddie feels his eyes get wide, his cheeks flush even fucking more. “What, that I’m—? No. No, I haven’t fucking said it.”

“You might feel better if you say it.”

“I might—? _What?_ I haven’t even— I mean, I don’t know if— how would I even—”

“Woah, woah, woah,” Richie cuts him off, uncharacteristically gentle and sincere again, which is the only thing that gets Eddie’s hackles to lower. “It’s okay, man. You don’t actually _have_ to say it. You don’t even have to know. It’s cool.”

“I’m forty-one fucking years old, it is not _cool,_ I should—” Eddie’s throat clicks, he hears it. “I should know this shit by now, shouldn’t I?”

“Fuck _should,_ man,” Richie says without a trace of irony. And he clearly means it, means it with every fiber of his being. “Seriously, fuck _should._ Even if you didn’t have the excuse that a fucking sewer monster torched your entire psyche when you were a kid— and that’s just Mrs. K, not even counting the _literal_ sewer monster—”

“Yep, there it is, fuck you—”

“— it still wouldn’t be a big deal if you didn’t know,” Richie tells him, dropping into sincerity again with no fanfare whatsoever. “Or if you think you might know but you don’t wanna, like, put a pin in it yet.” He shakes his head, shrugs. “Or ever, fuck it. It’s fine. I mean, come on, you think I give a shit? I don’t give a shit what subset of people you might or might not be willing to sleep with, Eds, I’m honestly a little too busy being _super fucking stoked_ that I somehow ended up being one of ‘em.”

There it is again. The way he just fucking _says_ shit like that, like he’s so goddamn enamored by _Eddie_ of all people.

It’s ridiculous. He’s ridiculous.

Eddie looks down and tries to control the heat in his face.

“Thanks, Rich.”

“Yeah, don’t fucking thank me until you stop torturing yourself with that pathetic excuse for a meal, I mean, Jesus Christ, not even a crouton?”

Richie groans, all melodramatic about it, and spears a piece of his pancake and holds it out toward Eddie.

“Come on, man. Live a little. For me.”

“I can’t have fucking gluten—”

“You _can_ have fucking gluten and we both know it.”

Eddie huffs and rolls his eyes, but he opens his mouth and lets Richie stuff an oversized piece of chocolate chip pancake into it.

He _intends_ to make a fuss about how overly sweet it is, because that’s the biggest thing he harped on Richie for, buttering and heavily syruping his already sweetened pancakes, but… God fucking damn it. It’s literally the best thing he’s ever tasted, god _damn_ it. He chews as slowly as humanly possible, helpless to the way his eyes go wide and his shoulders lose all their tension. He hadn’t even realized they were tense in the first place.

Richie does not bother to keep the shit-eating grin from his face.

Eddie gulps down the largest quantity of sugar he’s had in the last three decades, eyes up Richie’s plate with its half a pancake still left, and barely gets through the question, “Can I—?” before Richie’s already sliding his plate across to him, laughing all the while.

But…

Okay. Here’s the thing.

The thing is, for at least the past two decades, Eddie has lived his life under the quiet assumption that love may have _existed,_ sure, but it did not exist in the way so many people described it — or at least not for him.

He loved. Of course he did.

(He _thinks_ he did, he must have, right?)

But it was never the kind of love shown in movies, that sort of desperate, heart-pounding, I-need-you-now-or-I’m-gonna-fucking-die kind of love. It was never the kind of love that Patty Uris would one day describe to him, that calm warm weight of knowing you’re going to spend the rest of your life with someone and genuinely, deeply looking forward to every second of it.

It was never like that.

People romanticized it. They prettied it up, made it seem more exciting than it really was. Eddie would never have openly called love an _obligation_ or a _job_ — that would have been too cynical even for him — but for a very long time he might as well have.

He loved his mother because she was his mother, because on some level he knew that _not_ loving her opened up a window into some terrifying reality he was never going to be quite ready to face, a reality in which his murky childhood under her roof was not all innocence and tender loving care like Sonia Kaspbrak so often insisted that it was. He loved Myra for many of the same reasons, except the idea of not loving her had no bearing on his poorly remembered childhood but on his very real _present,_ nothing but a great chasm of loneliness awaiting him on the other side of leaving her.

It wasn’t until that dusty windowpane was wiped clean, not until he remembered the childhood that made him who he _was_ and the people who got him through it, that Eddie realized how wrong he’d been.

Love, the _real_ kind, in all its heart-pounding desperate warm painful exquisite glory, was not something he lacked the capacity for feeling at all but something he’d… not even quite _forgotten,_ really, but set aside, tucked away.

The feeling was always there, now that he thinks back on it, in little fleeting moments where it leaked out from the box in which it’d been locked up.

It was there when he drove out to that one hiking spot he liked the most, the one where he could see the New York skyline and he could sit and watch his city from a distance over the backdrop of a sunrise. It was there when he spent a late night drinking with a friend in college, listening fondly to him going on and on about all the places they would be destined to go after graduation. It was there in the hidden moments from strangers in the city, a little kid blowing raspberries at him, a woman laughing on the phone, a passenger on the subway sharing a look with him over the latest weird thing going on in their subway car.

It was always there.

And it’s something of a trip, now, to have that feeling bursting out of him again, to have it fill him up to the fucking gills and drive him out of his fucking mind, to be so terrifyingly in love with not just one person but _six_ to the point that he would be — and was, _is_ — more than willing to die for any one of them.

And, well. He did. But that’s beside the point.

Eddie takes a breath, slowly and meanderingly brings himself back to the present, to the weight of Richie’s arm slung over his waist and the even puff of breath on his ribs.

About ten minutes ago Richie all but collapsed where he’s at now, flopping down onto the mattress with a breathless, _God, I fucking love you,_ and they’ve been lying here in a lazy quiet ever since. And that, that breathless borderline _brainless_ declaration of love, is what eventually led Eddie’s mind to wandering around this well worn circuit, the helpless agonizing over what love actually _is,_ that feeling that was muted in his twenties and his thirties and is fucking exploding out of him now at the ripe old age of forty-one.

Eddie starts dragging his fingers through Richie’s hair, breathing deep and easy while some modicum of feeling trickles pleasantly back into his legs.

And isn’t _that_ funny, he thinks, that the very same thoughts he had about love — that other people sort of hyped it up, that Eddie wasn’t capable of feeling it so fully, that something in him wasn’t quite built properly to feel it the way he was supposed to — he _also_ thought about sex.

Turns out he was wrong about that, too. Very fucking wrong about that. And technically they haven’t even _had_ sex yet, not really, unless you count—

Okay, wow, he is getting way off track. Jesus.

What was he thinking about again?

_God, I fucking love you._

Eddie chews on his cheek for a second as he turns those words over and over in his brain, and then he quotes, his voice low, “Basically since for-fucking-ever.” 

Richie’s answer is barely more than a grunt, but it’s a questioning one. He’s listening.

“What you said,” Eddie clarifies, pausing in his combing of Richie’s hair to poke the top of his head. “First time we did this. You said you… You said basically since forever.”

Incrementally, Richie tightens the arm that’s looped around Eddie’s waist. He opens his mouth like he wants to say something, but then he seems to think better of it because he shuts his mouth and nods, his cheek moving against Eddie’s ribs.

“That’s…” Eddie lets out a breath, “… a really long time.”

Richie mumbles, “Fuckin’ telling _me.”_

“So… So, then, when we were kids—”

“I was fuckin’ gone for every dumb dorky thing about you, yeah,” Richie interrupts, his voice muddled a bit with sleep, and Eddie wonders for a second if he actually _was_ asleep before Eddie started talking to him. “Having my big… gay crisis at… what, twelve? Thirteen? I don’t know, dude, but you were, uh…” He yawns, turns his face a little more fully into Eddie’s ribs. “You were right there at the fuckin’ center of it. Whole time.”

“Really?”

“Mm. Got a whole lifetime of repression to show for it, Kaspbrak.”

“I mean… You didn’t know me for most of that time.”

At that, Richie finally moves, propping himself up on one elbow to raise an eyebrow at Eddie. A section of his hair in the back is sticking straight up. Even this close up, he still has to squint without his glasses, little slivers of grey-blue irises and visibly blown out pupils.

“Your post-coital pillow talk is so hot, Eds.”

Eddie snorts, planting his hand over Richie’s entire face and gently shoving him. “God, shut up.”

“No, seriously, this is really doing it for me,” Richie says, settling back down. “Getting me all revved up for round two.”

Eddie just laughs, shaking his head.

Richie murmurs against his skin, “For real, though, I mean… I don’t know what you want me to say, dude. I’m not gonna like, fucking _Nicholas Sparks_ this, you know? All I know is I was stupidly in love with you then, and I’m stupidly in love with you now, and in between… It’s like you said, right? I didn’t know who the fuck you were, but I still missed you, right? Guess whatever part of me was missing a pint-sized neurotic asshole I couldn’t remember— _ow,”_ he cuts off, because Eddie just lightly swatted at the top of his head, _“anyway,_ I’m saying the part that was missing you was probably going all heart-eyes over you, too. All I’m saying. ‘S not that big of a stretch.”

Eddie chews on his cheek for a second, thinking, and eventually he elects to answer with, “I’m surprised you were sober enough to remember when I said that.”

Richie scoffs. “Uh, _duh._ You getting all sappy on me when I was still in, like, hopelessly pining mode? Super-in-love-with-my-very-off-limits-and-very-straight-best-friend mode? Yeah, no shit I fuckin’ remember it.”

And Eddie… doesn’t know how to directly respond to that. He doesn’t know what to say to the fact that Richie just said some iteration of _in love with you_ about four or five fucking times in one go.

Eddie hasn’t actually said the words at all yet, outside of a single breathless _me, too,_ and outside of small gestures and trying to pour everything he feels into every _slightly_ aggressive kiss and occasionally fussing over Richie like the mother hen he still is— because, well, that’s just how love translates in Eddie’s brain, isn’t it? Fussing over someone, making sure they’re safe. And even if that wasn’t the way love translates to him, Eddie doesn’t even know how _not_ to fuss over someone, and it’s _Richie_ and Richie has never taken care of himself even on the best of days and Richie fucking _matters_ and—

And Richie doesn’t say _I love you_ like anyone else ever has.

That’s the big thing.

Everyone says it differently. His mother always said it like he needed reminding, like he was a silly naive boy and _you don’t understand why I do what I do, you never could understand a mother’s love, Eddie, don’t you realize I’m only trying to protect you?_ Then there was Myra, cool and perfunctory, the automatic end to a conversation that still somehow demands an answer for all its thoughtlessness.

The losers were all a whole new experience, or a lost-and-found one, technically. Like warmth deep down into the marrow of his bones, like a foundation, solid ground for him to love from, like they may be saying _I love you, Eddie,_ but that really comes secondary to the real message of _you are loved, Eddie._

And meanwhile, Richie…

Richie says it like he thinks he’s just fucking enamored by Eddie’s entire existence, like he thinks he’s lucky as all hell to be _able_ to say it and to be _allowed_ to love Eddie at all, with all the pent up anger and ridiculous pain-in-the-ass neuroses included. It’s like he’s giddy on the adrenaline of having said it the first time and can’t get enough of it. Which makes sense, Eddie thinks, if Richie’s been living with this feeling inside him for as long as he says he has and he’s been _aware_ of it the whole damn time.

Er— the whole damn time, with the minor exception of that intervening twenty-seven years. Whatever. He’s certainly been aware of what this feeling was for a hell of a lot longer than Eddie has.

_God, I fucking love you._

Eddie pulls his hand through Richie’s hair again. He rolls the words around in his brain. He drags his nails across Richie’s scalp the way he’s found Richie likes, the way that makes him go boneless with a nice contented sigh against Eddie’s skin. Then he dips his head down and presses a kiss to the top of Richie’s head.

“I meant it,” Eddie murmurs, instead of the thing he really wants to say. “I’m really glad we found each other again.”

Whatever, you know? Fuck it. He’s been brave as shit the last few weeks, he’s earned himself a few comfortable moments of cowardice.

And if the kiss pressed to his shoulder is any indication, Richie doesn’t mind.

“I am forty-one fucking years old,” Eddie says, phone pressed to his ear and rain droplets pattering on the roof of his car, “and I’m just _now_ figuring out how to, like, actually love someone the way you’re supposed to. I mean, _what_ the fuck.”

Beverly’s laugh comes through the receiver low and breathy, and it’s like he can hear the crystal clear thought of Ben on her mind, of his soft eye-crinkling smiles and his soft tender little-kid heart unchanged after thirty years, of how hard it must be — and Eddie can only _imagine_ how hard it must be — to let herself be loved by someone like that after the life she’s lived.

Finally, she says, “It’s a trip, isn’t it?”

“It’s fucked the hell up is what it is.”

She laughs again, a puff of breath. “Yeah. We are a little fucked up.”

“Losers through and through,” Eddie murmurs, tipping his head back against the driver’s seat headrest and closing his eyes. “I mean, fuck, Bev. I don’t even know the first thing about how to— _do_ any of this. And I fucking should! I thought I did before, but it turns out I was just kind of… letting her carry me along. I wasn’t really _there._ Not like I should’ve been. And I sure as shit didn’t love her.”

The obvious corollary, _and I sure as shit do love him,_ goes unspoken, but Eddie’s confident it doesn’t go unheard.

He clarifies anyway, “I don’t want to… do that, with Richie. I don’t want to fall back into who I was before, you know? I don’t want to get carried along and not _be_ there, because he’s— important. He’s so fucking good at this it’s _insane,_ and I’m just… not.”

“You love him,” Bev says, because she’s Bev and she’s never fucking let any of them off the hook for anything, and Eddie can’t begrudge her for it. She’s right, after all. “You love him, so you’ll figure it out. Trust me.”

Eddie takes a breath against the weight in his throat. He stares up at the ceiling upholstery of his car. _You love him, so you’ll figure it out._ She sounds so fucking confident about it, confident in him, in a way that Eddie just can never bring himself to be.

“Did _you_ figure it out, Bev?”

“I’m working on it. Slow and steady. Like I said, it’s a trip.”

“Well.” Eddie gulps. “I hope you get there. Seriously.”

“I will,” she says, like there’s absolutely no reason to doubt it, sure as sunrise. “We _both_ will, Eddie.”

And Eddie does his best to believe it.

He quits his job.

It’s a bit of a mess. He refuses to _not_ give them the customary two weeks notice, which means he ends up getting a fucking hotel room just outside of Manhattan for those two weeks, which he pays out the ass for, just to avoid being a dick to a bunch of coworkers he still barely even knows after eighteen years.

It sucks. Objectively. But it’s also kind of nice.

“Is it?” Richie asks when Eddie says as much, eight days in, sitting back against his hotel bed’s headboard with the phone on speaker beside his thigh and his laptop propped open on his lap. There is _so much_ work he has to finish even on his off hours, even with him leaving the company in less than a week.

Why the hell had he ever thought he _liked_ this job?

“Yeah, I dunno,” Eddie answers. “The time to myself is nice, I guess, but it’s just… New York, you know?”

“Can’t say I do, Eds.”

“What? What do you—? Wait, have you _never_ been to New York?”

“I mean, yeah, it’s kind of hard not to hit New York when you do a coast-to-coast tour, but I never like… _hung out_ in the city? It was always, like, get off my flight and into a cab, do my show, hit an afterparty at the nearest bar and then back in a cab to catch a red-eye to the next place. So, like, I’ve been there, but I’ve never really _been there,_ you know what I mean?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do,” Eddie says, buying himself a second to type out the last few lines of this contract. Then he says, “I’m gonna have to show you around here sometime.”

“Ooh, a personal guided tour from Dr. K himself? I would be honored.”

Eddie snorts, shaking his head even though Richie can’t see it. “Yeah, I live— er, lived in Midtown, so that’s mostly where I’d show you around, all the dumb touristy stuff, Empire State, Times Square. You’d probably lose your fucking mind in that M&M store.”

“Oh, I bet.”

A second or two passes in comfortable silence. Eddie skims over the contract and makes sure he’s satisfied with it before closing it out, and then Richie continues:

“You could show me around anywhere you want, man. Never really gave a shit about New York, but I dunno, knowing you like it so much? Knowing it’s, like, special to you or— you know. Gives it a new layer, I guess. Added appreciation. You could just show me all those gross subway stations and all the gum stuck under the subway seats and I’d probably be all fuckin’ about it.”

Eddie feels himself blushing, _again,_ mostly because he knows Richie is being one hundred percent sincere. New York means something to Eddie, so it means something to Richie, too. Simple as that.

He wonders, for a moment, if L.A. is as special to Richie as New York is to Eddie, but before he can ask, Richie cuts back in.

“Course, we could just, like, shack up in a hotel room 24/7, too.”

Eddie snorts again. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

“You would hear _no_ complaints from me.”

“Oh, no, I think I would hear some complaints, your old-ass back can’t handle 24/7 of this.”

“My old _ass?_ Or my old-ass back?”

“Both, dickhead,” Eddie laughs, biting his lip to try and stop straining his cheeks and fucking up the scar before it actually _scars._ Not an easy feat when he’s talking to Richie. “Hey, you know… I know I said I was enjoying the time to myself and everything, and I am, but I do kind of, like, really wish you were here, man.”

 _“Kind of, like, really,”_ Richie repeats. “I’m pretty sure you gotta pick one or the other—”

“Oh, fuck off, I changed my mind.”

Richie’s laughing, though. “Yeah, I wish I was there, too,” he says, his voice softer and quieter than before. It’s unfairly endearing. Then he goes ahead and ruins it with, “Getting off just isn’t the same when I’m all by my _lonesome.”_

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie rolls his eyes.

“Hey, now, I’m totally serious! I’ve got a whole lot of new spank bank material, sure, but compared to the real thing—”

“Oh, my _God,”_ Eddie interrupts, snapping up the phone and turning it off speaker. He’s alone in a hotel room, but still. Thin walls are a thing. “You are ridiculous! You are absolutely fucking ridiculous.”

Richie laughs, and maybe turning him off speaker wasn’t the best idea, because his voice is still low and soft but now it’s right up next to Eddie’s ear. “Is your face as red as I’m picturing it? Come on, man, throw me a bone. I love when the stupid shit I say makes you blush like a tomato.”

Eddie licks his lips, smirks, and says before he can change his mind, “Not the only thing you do that makes me turn red.”

There’s a choked sound from the other end of the line, and Eddie’s smirk grows into an ear-to-ear grin.

Fucking _payback._

“Well, shit, Eds,” Richie breathes. “What time is it, fuckin’ ten o’clock? I could hop on a plane, be there in a couple hours, tops. I am _certain_ I’ll be blue-balled to hell by then but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make—”

Eddie’s genuinely laughing now, and he drops his face into his free hand. “Don’t fucking fly here for some dick, you goddamn horny bastard.”

“I believe the term is _thirsty bitch.”_

“Sure. Whatever, you thirsty bitch.”

“Oh, but Eddie, baby, I can’t help it,” Richie whines in a voice that is definitely meant to be some kind of young female porn star, so over-the-top that it doesn’t even have a chance to be sexy. “I think about your tight little body and suddenly I just can’t _control_ myself—”

“Oh, my _God,_ you’re fucking crazy—”

“Crazy about you, yeah,” Richie fires back.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, dumbly, still grinning wide like a dumbass, probably looking like all lovesick and sappy like he knows he always does when Richie says things like that.

“Seriously, though, Eds. I could be there in a few hours if you want.”

Eddie bites his lip, staring ahead at the opposite wall. “I do,” he admits. “But don’t, okay? Not right now.”

“But eventually?”

“Yeah. Soon. Maybe in a few days? If you— I mean, if you want to—”

“Of course I want to—”

“— you could fly down here from Bangor, I’ll pick you up, and we can close out my trip here and drive back up together. What do you think?”

“I— _yes,_ Eds. Fuck yeah, I’ll be there.”

“Okay. Think you can hold out til then?”

“Oh, I’ll be _beyond_ blue-balled by then, I assure you,” Richie tells him, deadly serious. “Or I’ll just jerk off so much my dick’s gonna be numb by the time I get there. Whichever.”

“Fucking _better_ not be numb, I plan on using that,” Eddie says, and Richie’s answering laugh is soft and a little bit strained. It does not take a genius to know that he’s a bit worked up by now, and that knowledge is enough to get Eddie to close the laptop and set it aside. He stuffs some pillows behind his back so he can lounge a little more comfortably, and he asks, “Hey, Rich?”

“Yeah, Eds?”

“You know I… I’ve never done anything… like that. With someone who wasn’t…”

“A _lady?”_

Richie draws out the word with a dramatic flair. Some of the tension falls from Eddie’s shoulders. He sighs. “Yeah, asshole.”

“I never would have guessed, man. You’re goddamn masterful with a dick. Fucking Michaelangelo over there.”

“Wow. Michaelangelo. Fucking really.”

“Yeah, like, the painter?”

“No, really? I thought you meant the fucking ninja turtle—”

“I don’t know, man, my brain’s not exactly firing on all cylinders here! Yeesh.”

“Your brain is _never_ firing on all—”

“Wait. Holy shit.”

Eddie blinks, pulls the phone away from his ear and looks at it, then brings it back. “What, dude?”

“Ninja turtles!”

“What fucking _about_ them?”

“You know, His Royal Omnipotence The Turtle God,” Richie says, in a tone like there’s a thread Eddie should be following here. “Think about it, man.”

“Think about _what?”_

“You come back to life, in a _sewer,_ and then you start having those weird dreams about turtles? I mean, that’s a pretty weird fucking coincidence, isn’t it? You think it’s connected somehow?”

… Jesus fucking Christ.

Eddie _chose_ this. And God help him, he loves it.

“No, Richie,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I do not think my resurrection from the dead has any connection, at all, whatsoever, to the fucking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”

“Hm. Well. No need to be a dick about it.”

Eddie laughs so hard he snorts, falling back against the headboard.

“Anyway, what were you saying?” Richie says, bringing them back. “About you never—? I mean, okay, like, you _know_ I don’t give a shit who you’ve slept with, right? And I already know you were married to a woman for, like, ever.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Eddie shrugs, shimmying down the bed until he’s lying down. “I’m just— I mean, I’m new to… all this, is what I’m saying, so I don’t really know how it… works?”

“Could have fucking fooled me.”

“I don’t mean— I’m not talking about that! Obviously I know how handjobs and blowjobs work, dipshit. I’m talking about, like… _sex_ sex.”

There is a very long, very silent pause.

“Richie?”

“Uh— Yeah, no, I’m uh… I’m here,” Richie says, breathy and quiet. “You want to?”

Eddie drums his fingers on his knee, drags his bottom lip between his teeth. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. I just, I mean, like I said, I don’t really know, uh… how we— or, you know, which one of us—”

“Who would be fucking who, you mean?”

Heat fans across his cheeks. “Yeah. I mean, I don’t— I’ve only ever—”

He cuts himself off, scrubs his hand over his face, and makes the conscious decision right here and now to throw the subtly out the window. He’s had Richie’s dick _in his mouth,_ for God’s sake. Why is he dancing around this?

“Okay, so, like, my marriage was so not the kind of environment where something like pegging was even in the fucking _viscinity_ of being on the table, so I’ve obviously never been the one getting fucked, I’ve always been the one doing the fucking, and I mean, I’m not even sure if I would _like…_ that? Getting fucked? I might like it, but I don’t know. Like I said, this kind of thing is… new. To me. I have no idea whether I’d even like being on the other end of that, and sure, I might be willing to try it eventually, probably—”

“Holy _shit,_ Eds—”

“— but I do know how it feels to be on the giving end, and I think I would be more comfortable with that? At least starting off, because I know I like that much at least, and I know I’d like it a hell of a lot more if it was you, since I like just about everything better when it’s with you, so… Yeah.”

“‘So, yeah?’” Richie parrots, incredulous and way too high-pitched. “You just drop ‘Hey, Richie, I would be down to literally fuck you,’ and you follow that up with, ‘So, yeah?’”

“Is there a fucking echo on this phone? Yeah, dude. Is that… something you would want?”

“Is that something—? Oh, my God. Eds, you are never gonna be able to say the words ‘fuck you’ in my presence ever again without me getting _uncomfortably_ turned on, holy shit. _Yes,_ that’s something I’d want.” He lets out a shuddering breath. “Jesus. Is that something _you_ want?”

“I…” Eddie trails off, thinks of Richie in the diner saying, _What do you actually want?_ “I just… want to make you feel good, Rich. That’s all.”

Again, there’s a long moment in which Richie says nothing, but Eddie hears something that might be a puff of breath.

“Rich? Are you jerking off right now?”

“Not fucking _yet.”_

Eddie tips his head back against the pillows. “Why not?”

This time Richie definitely laughs, and this time it is distinctly strained. “I wasn’t gonna stick my hand down my pants when I’m on the phone with you without fucking _permission,_ dude, that’d be fuckin’ rude.”

“Well, you have it. My permission.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. I like how you sound when you get like this.”

 _“Fuck,_ Eds. Say no more. I mean, fucking— don’t— don’t actually stop talking, I don’t know what the fuck I’m saying.”

Eddie smiles wide again. “You sound a lot different when you’re turned on, you know that?”

“Mm? How?”

“Whole lot dumber, for one thing.”

A snort. “Fucking _thanks.”_

“You’re welcome. Really. I’m not kidding. It’s kind of nice knowing I’m the one who shut your whole brain down, you know?”

“Uh… huh? Yeah. Mm-hmm.”

Eddie closes his eyes, tries to match the sound of Richie’s breathing to what he must look like right now. _He’s_ nearly fully hard, too, just thinking about it, but that can wait.

“I told you, Rich, I just… I like making you feel good. You’re always doing that for me,” Eddie tells him, and funny enough, he finds himself thinking not of Richie’s dick or his mouth but of his _hands,_ the way he holds Eddie’s face with one and feels up his side with the other, the way he grips the bedsheets when Eddie goes down on him, the way he’s probably gripping his phone — and himself — right now. “I mean, I didn’t even know this kind of thing _could_ feel as good as it does, so it’s pretty fucking nice when I get to return the favor.”

There’s another of those choked-off sort of sounds, and Richie’s voice is low when he asks, “You think you don’t already fucking do that?”

“Oh, no, I am well aware that I do,” Eddie assures him. “I love doing it, and I’m gonna _keep_ doing it, over and over and over again… Long as you let me.”

“Jesus fucking—” Richie cuts off, panting a bit, and says, “You ever consider a job as a phone sex, uh… person?”

“Operator?”

“Operator, fuck, yeah, that— that’s the word.”

“Can’t say it ever occurred to me before, no.”

“Thinkin’ ‘bout it now, though?”

“Thinking about a lot of things now,” Eddie says. “You sound close.”

“I— _fuck,_ yeah, I’m—”

“Come on, Rich,” Eddie murmurs, and he has to shift and adjust himself, pressing the heel of his palm into his dick through his pajama pants, just trying to relieve a bit of pressure. “Come on, give me something to think about after I get off the phone. God knows I need _something_ to hold me over until you actually fucking get here. I need something to jerk off to, or when you’re finally here I’m not gonna last long enough to make it as good for you as I want it to be— as good as _you’re_ always making it for _me—”_

He hears it, then, when Richie goes over the edge, hears the way his breath leaves him along with all coherent thought and a half-groan half-whine that barely carries through the receiver.

Eddie closes his eyes, feeling warm all over. Is that pride? It feels like pride.

“God,” Richie murmurs, wrecked and punched out and breathless. _“God,_ fuck, I never— I’ve never— done that, before. On the phone. Shit.”

Eddie bites his lip. It does not stop him from smiling. “Me neither. I liked it.”

“You—? What, were you…?”

“Nope. Just listening to you.”

“Oh, you _perv.”_

Eddie laughs. He’s still hard, but he can still take care of that later. “How soon can you be here, Rich?”

“Fucking wait until I can _think_ again and I will start looking up plane tickets right goddamn now.”

“… Okay,” Eddie says, knowing his voice sounds small and way too loving, which is still somehow not loving enough. He wants to fucking _scream_ it, but, well, what the hell kind of timing would that be?

“Eds?”

“Go get yourself cleaned up,” Eddie tells him, “and do not forget to brush your fucking teeth before you go to bed.”

“Yessir.”

“And I’ll see you soon. Real soon.”

“Yeah, you will. I’ll even send you my flight details so you can rip into me about picking, like, a subpar airline with a zero-point-zero-one percent higher crash rate than the other ones.”

God, this is it. Eddie is done. He is completely gone over this fucking moron.

“Eds?”

“Do not fucking fly Spirit, you asshole. Or Southwest.”

“Do Spirit and Southwest even _have_ flights out of Maine?”

“I don’t know, dude, I don't fly either of them. You know Southwest got a fucking _three out of seven_ on an airline safety rating website? Fucking three out of seven! Less than fifty percent!”

“Okay, okay, how ‘bout United Airlines? They pass the Dr. K. Safety Bar?”

“Yeah, United is fine.”

“And is Newark close enough to your hotel that you can pick me up?”

“Yup.”

 _“Oh_ -kay! Ticket’s officially mine. I’ll be there in three days.”

“Can’t wait.”

“Yeah. Me fucking either, Eds.”

It isn’t until Richie finally gets there, and a full day after that, when they’re lying in the hotel bed face-to-face and slowly drifting off mid-conversation, groggy and worn out from a day of fighting their way through Manhattan, after Eddie’s spent nearly two weeks walking around the city where he’s made his residence for the last three decades, that he finally finds it in himself to ask the question that’s been stewing in his mind since the Midtown apartment was officially no longer his.

Richie’s eyebrows shoot up as soon as the words are out of Eddie’s mouth, and he very nearly opens his mouth to backtrack.

Until Richie speaks first.

“Eds. Eddie. Come on. Fucking— of course you can come to L.A. with me,” Richie breathes into the space between them, his breath full of toothepaste, his smile wide and bright and _happy_ the way Eddie loves it. He brings one hand up to Eddie’s cheek and leans in for a kiss, soft and slow. “Can’t fucking believe you thought you had to _ask.”_

“We’re still gonna come around here to visit all the time, though.”

“Yeah, obviously,” Richie agrees. “Like, an _unhealthy_ amount of vacations in Maine. I’m all over it.”

“But we’ll live in L.A.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“In your apartment.”

“Kinda feels like we’re gonna be making it _our_ apartment, but y’know, potato tomato.”

Eddie sags down into the pillow. Richie’s hand is still on his face, lightly stroking with his thumb, and now it’s been over a month since Eddie shoved down all his anxieties for just long enough to cross a cabin floor and kiss his best friend, and he still sometimes _cannot quite fucking believe_ the result. Cannot quite fucking believe that not only was the feeling mutual, but it had been, apparently for a really long ass time. Longer than Eddie had even imagined.

“So why’d you say I could live in New York?”

Richie blinks, eyes magnified somehow even without the glasses he’s long since discarded on the nightstand. “Huh?”

“You— I mean, when we were talking about… where I’m gonna live. At the diner? And you were like, ‘You could still live in New York if you wanted,’ so I kind of figured…?”

“What, that I didn’t _want_ you to come to L.A.? Eds, come on,” Richie grins at him all beseeching and still a little bit sleepy. “I would’ve followed you around like a lost puppy wherever you wanted to go, man. New York, California, fuckin’ Maine. _Obviously_ I have my biases, but, y’know, I wasn’t gonna be like, ‘Oh, hey, I know _literally_ every fucking thing about your life just got flipped over and all, but hear me out, how about you hike across an entire continent and condemn yourself to sharing the same eight hundred square feet with a guy who literally cannot remember the last time he washed his sheets?’ Like, yeah, okay, _that_ would have gone over well—”

“I love you,” Eddie says, because he just can’t hold it in long enough to wait another minute or another twenty-seven fucking years, much less wait until Richie’s done _talking,_ which could be even longer. “You know that, right? I really, really love the shit out of you.”

It visibly knocks Richie’s momentum off. A freight train shouldered off the track. One of those sappy smiles spreads across his face, crinkles the corners of his eyes.

“… Yeah?”

Eddie nods. Because he does. Of course he fucking does. He _has,_ basically since for-fucking-ever.

“‘Kay, well, _maaaybe_ consider holding off on the declarations of love until you see the state our apartment’s in,” Richie says, and he winks. “But y’know. I love you, too.”

 _“Our_ apartment,” Eddie repeats, blowing out a stunned breath, because he doesn’t give a shit what state the apartment’s in if Richie’s calling it _theirs._ “Holy shit.”

“Yeah. Yeah, totally. Our apartment. If that’s what you want.”

“Yeah,” Eddie echoes him. “Yes.” He bridges the distance between them himself this time, and Richie never seems to get used to that, letting out a hum against his mouth that’s all pleased surprise. “It is. That’s what I want.”

“Well, then, _as you wish, sir.”_

Eddie rolls his eyes, kisses him again. “Jesus Christ, how many fucking times do I have to tell you not to do the British Guy when we’re in bed?” Another kiss, punctuated by a bemused laugh from Richie. “Huh? Dickhead?” Another kiss. “How many fucking times?”

“Okay, so—”

“Woah, woah, _woah,_ compadre, rein it in for a sec—”

“Did you seriously just call me _compadre_ when we’re—”

“I’m just _saying,_ this isn’t what you’re, uh, what you’re _used_ to, you know? You can’t just go right in, you gotta—”

 _“I know that!_ Holy shit, how clueless do you think I am?”

“I mean, you’re the one that said you haven’t—”

“Yeah, but I’ve done my research—”

“Oh, of course you did research—”

“Yes, asshole— and just what the _fuck_ are you laughing at—”

“I’m not laughing, I’m smiling, there’s a huge difference, and— _ho-ho-holy shit._ Hey! C’mon! No fair!”

“Hm? What were you saying?”

“Har-dee-fucking-har, you’re _so_ fucking funny, you should be the comedian, you know I can’t— _fuck—_ can’t think when— oh, _shit that’s so good, fuck—”_

“Cat got your tongue there, Rich?”

“No, actually, a pint-sized asshole has my— _oh, ho, come on—_ my _dick—_ okay okay okay, you keep doing that and this is gonna be over real quick, Eds—”

“Mm. Can’t have that, huh?”

“Fucking _no_ we can’t. What the fuck were we—? You turned my brain off again. Shit.”

“We were talking about—”

“Right! Your painstaking research—”

“Oh, sure, go ahead and keep making fun of me—”

“I’m _not_ making fun of you, Eds— hey, wait, hang on, seriously, I’m not. For real, man, it’s…”

“If you say cute, I swear to God.”

“… I wasn’t… going… to?”

“Uh-huh. Sure you weren’t.”

“Okay, but really, you’re… okay? With this?”

 _“Okay with—?_ Yes, I’m fucking okay with it! What the fuck kind of question?”

“Alright, well, I mean, I just— I don’t know. Fuck, dude. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“Hey. Are _you_ okay with it?”

“Eddie, I am literally so turned on right now this is gonna be like college all over again, man, I’m talking _real_ two pump chump, so if you’re cool with _that,_ then… yeah.”

“Okay. Yeah, just… You’ll tell me when to stop?”

“Yeah. Course. Obviously.”

“Okay.”

“Pretty sure it’ll be fuckin’ obvious anyway, though, I mean, when I explode all over this nice fancy hotel bed you… uh… you can…”

“Hm?”

“Uh… I, uh…”

And it’s funny, Eddie thinks, how turning Richie on never actually shuts him up; it only ever makes him talk _more,_ makes him babble and spew half-assed jokes and power his way through breathless smiles to comment on how hot Eddie is or whatever the fuck other thought crosses his hormone-addled mind. An already shoddy brain-to-mouth filter rendered totally fucking useless.

But this?

This shuts him up _real_ fast. 

Eddie’s only got one finger in, and Richie hasn’t said a coherent thing yet. He tips his head back against the pillow. His mouth falls open. His eyelashes flutter.

And that’s _it._ Not a fucking word.

“This okay, Rich?”

“Mm… hmm…?”

“Yeah? You sure?”

“Y— yeah, Eds, I… yeah.”

“‘Cause I can stop if—”

“Don’t. Don’t stop, okay?”

Eddie grins wide. “It’s good?”

 _“Fuck._ Un— under— uh—”

“Understatement.”

“Mm. Yep. That.”

Eddie’s smile, if possible, grows even wider. Richie rolls his hips in a way that is absolutely fucking _obscene,_ clearly trying to help out and let Eddie get in there deeper, so Eddie obliges. He dips down to nip at the really sensitive spot under Richie’s jaw, pride welling up in him at the way that makes Richie shudder all over, and he kisses his way down the column of Richie’s throat to his chest as he slides another finger in.

Then he lifts himself back up, and he enjoys the show. He lazily runs his free hand up and down along Richie’s skin, elbow braced on the bed beside Richie’s ribs, fingers lightly dragging through the hairs on his chest. Usually he’ll bite and suck bruises into Richie’s skin everywhere he can reach, anywhere that’s exposed, but now that they’re doing something— new, to them, Eddie finds himself defaulting to gentle touches, light kisses. He spreads the fingers of both hands, stroking Richie’s chest with one and slowly scissoring him open with the other, and he watches as Richie honest-to-God _whimpers_ and reaches back to grip the pillow behind his head.

Richie throws his other arm over his eyes and murmurs, “Jesus _shit.”_

Eddie hums, smiling as he kisses the closest spot he can reach, which is somewhere around Richie’s ribs.

“Eddie…”

“Hm?” Eddie asks, reaching up a little higher so he can kiss just under Richie’s collarbone. “What’s up?”

Richie licks his lips, and Eddie gets a fantastic view of his whole arm flexing when he tightens his fist on the pillow. He really, really likes Richie’s arms, but that’s no secret. “Okay, I, uh— I think— can we…?”

“Stop?”

 _“No_ fuckin’ way,” Richie huffs out.

“What, you’re ready?”

“Yeah, I’m this fuckin’ close to losing it over here, man,” Richie breathes, lifting the arm he’s got draped over his eyes to shoot a look down at him that Eddie can only think to describe as _hungry,_ pupils blown wide, mouth open, lips still kiss damp. Eddie doesn’t break eye contact, kissing along his chest until he reaches a nipple, and when he lightly sucks on it Richie throws his head back and his hips jerk, apparently of their own accord.

_“Eds.”_

“You’re definitely ready,” Eddie says. “You’re sure?”

Richie nods, bordering on frantic. “Please.”

“Oh, well, since you said please,” Eddie murmurs, lightly sucking on his nipple again, then peppering kisses up his chest, slowly slipping his fingers out of Richie as he goes. Once he’s out, he rocks back and sits on his heels, admiring Richie all laid out on the bed with his chest heaving and not a scrap of clothing on him, and he peels off the lube-slick glove with the efficiency of someone who’s practiced peeling off a rubber glove a hundred or more times. Because he has.

Then he shimmies off the bed and tosses the glove in the wastebasket, swapping it out for the condom that’s sitting on the nightstand.

“Hey,” Richie breathes, blindly reaching for him with a hand slapping on the mattress. “Hey, wait, do you…? Whaddya need first, Eds? I didn’t even—”

Eddie can’t help laughing, shaking his head as he rolls the condom on. “What, you think I need help? Since when am I ever not hard the second you get your shirt off, huh?”

“Eh,” Richie shrugs, letting both arms flop back onto the bed, starfished on his back.

Whatever else he was planning on saying, if there was anything at all, doesn’t get said. Eddie works a healthy amount of lube onto himself and then clambers back onto the bed, walking forward on his knees until his hips are slotted up against the backs of Richie’s thighs.

“Mm, wait, wait, wait, c’mere,” Richie mumbles.

He reaches up and grabs Eddie by the back of the neck, pulling him up and forward until they’re an awkward mess of tangled limbs, but it brings them close enough for Richie to kiss the life out of him, which was evidently his intention. Eddie smiles into the kiss and gives as good as he gets, pressing Richie back into the pillow, reveling as he always does in the feel of Richie’s hands cradling his face.

“Okay,” Richie pants as they break apart. “Okay, now I’m ready. Not sure we’ll be able to do that during, y’know, what with you being all vertically challenged and all—”

“Oh, my God, we are almost the same height, _fuck_ you!”

“That is the idea!”

Eddie smiles and bites his bottom lip, shaking his head, and then he shuffles back and reaches around Richie’s leg with his hand that’s still slick with lube, feeling around until he’s able to sweep a thumb over Richie’s opening. His cock twitches against his belly in response to even that much, and Eddie glances up at his punch-drunk face and asks, “You sure you’re okay with this?”

“Christ’s sake, Eds, if you wanna stop, you can, but if you stop on my account I _will_ start crying, and that is a fucking promise.”

Eddie takes a steadying breath and nods, carefully lining himself up without another word. He’s so turned on it almost hurts — obviously, how can he _not_ be after that little show — but his heart still pounds relentlessly against his temples, a mixture of adrenaline and nerves, because, well, _shit,_ he’s not exactly experienced at this, and the very last thing he wants to do is hurt Richie. Ever, let alone now.

Gently, slowly, carefully, Eddie lines up and pushes himself in a millimeter at a time, watching Richie’s face every second of the way, shifting the position of his knees to get the angle right.

It is…

Wow. _Definitely_ a far cry from what he’s used to, definitely a far cry from anything he’s ever felt before, and fucking _Christ_ is it good. Like, fucking instantly. Eddie’s mouth falls open, one hand gripping Richie by the thigh with his thumb hooked behind Richie’s knee, the other splayed out on Richie’s stomach, trailing higher up the deeper he slides himself in.

Richie lets out a low groan, eyes closed, eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks. He blindly feels around until he lands with his palm over the back of Eddie’s hand on his chest, and he moves with Eddie, lifting his hips to help out with the angle.

“Mm, _fuck,”_ Eddie breathes when he’s all the way in, hips flush against Richie’s thighs. “Good?”

“Eds, please—” Richie chokes out, lacing their fingers together and opening his eyes just enough to see him. “Please just fuck me, I’m losing my mind, please—”

Eddie does not need to be told again.

He pulls out, slowly, slowly, slowly, unable to hold back an embarrassing whine from his throat as that fucking _incredible_ pressure moves along the length of him, and then, nearly as slowly, he leans all his weight into Richie’s thighs and pushes forward until he’s all the way in again.

“Oh, my _God,_ fucking Christ—” Richie pants, lifting his hips up again, reaching back to grasp the pillow again. His arm flexes, every delicious muscle tensing from his shoulder all the way to his elbow.

Richie was right about one thing, at least. As much as Eddie wants to, he cannot actually reach to kiss Richie’s face from this angle, not when he’s being this careful about not hurting him — maybe after they’ve done this a few more times and Eddie’s not convinced that one wrong move is gonna fucking split him in half — so he turns his head and directs that energy into kissing Richie’s knee instead. “You’re so fucking hot like this, Rich.”

He rocks his hips back and forth, slow and careful at first. Pleasure radiates down his thighs and up into his stomach, a thrumming crackle of electricity that surges with each thrust and recedes like a tide, back and forth and back and forth. He leaves his left hand on Richie’s chest, kneading at his thigh with the other, kissing his knee whenever he can get away with it without risking a broken nose from Richie’s reflexive jerking, of which there is a _lot._

Because, as Eddie is so pleased to find out, Richie gets _very_ enthusiastic about this very quickly. He rolls his hips into Eddie’s, flails around to grip Eddie by whatever he can reach — his ass, his arms, his shoulders, and back again, like he needs to be touching every single inch of Eddie before he’ll be satisfied — and he gets goddamn _loud._

It’s a steep build, Richie’s voice starting at a whimper and ramping up into genuine moans, and once the thought of accidentally hurting him recedes to the very back of Eddie’s mind and he’s able to find a good rhythm, Richie’s face flushes beat red and he starts cursing loudly enough that Eddie is one thousand percent _certain_ someone in the neighboring hotel rooms is gonna be banging on the walls to shut them the hell up soon. It doesn’t really matter, though, because Eddie… isn’t really capable of giving a shit at the moment.

“Rich?”

It’s everything Eddie can do to just slow down a tiny bit.

“Rich, I’m— I’m gonna— but I don’t want to, okay? Not— not before you do.”

Richie whines, low and drawn-out and bordering on a sob, and he shakes his head. “Don’t you _dare_ fucking stop, man, don’t you fucking worry about me, I’m— I’m close, I’m so fucking close, just— _fuck—!”_

It is not difficult to take Richie at his word, mostly because Eddie hadn’t actually _wanted_ to stop or even slow down, so he gives in and ramps it back up, rolling his hips forward and dropping his hand from Richie’s chest to grip the sheets instead, thrusting until the warmth in his stomach shoots up like a lightning bolt and all but splits _him_ in half, a crest of pleasure that he rides over with a curse ripped from the back of his throat and little thrusts into Richie as he comes.

When the sounds of the room trickle back to the mess of goop that his brain has become, he realizes that Richie’s own cursing has sped up and is verging on frantic, so without even really thinking about it he wraps a hand around Richie and coaxes him through it while he’s still inside him, and it only takes three or four good pumps before Richie comes entirely undone with a half-sobbed, _“Fuck_ me, Eds,” spilling all over himself and Eddie’s hand.

Eddie refrains from making the same joke again. It’s low hanging fruit. Also he doesn’t quite have the breath for it anyway.

He rests his cheek on Richie’s knee, catching his breath and watching as Richie does the same, both of them still in the process of coming down. Richie’s face is beautifully flushed, lips parted, eyes closed, chest heaving. Eddie turns and presses another kiss to his knee, idly stroking his leg.

“So,” Richie eventually huffs, eyes opening to slits, his voice slurring like he’s drunk. “Whaddya think? Think you like being the one doing the fucking, or…?”

Eddie hums, lazily shrugging one shoulder and giving a noncommittal _I dunno,_ before he cracks a smile and says, “Might have to try it a few more times to be sure.”

“Mm. Right. For science.”

“For science, yeah. Exactly. I mean—” Eddie falters, hesitating for just a second before he adds, “As long as you want to, we can.”

Richie blinks, and he directs a _very_ pointed look down at himself, where his entire torso is splattered with his own come. God, that’s gross, Eddie thinks. Or at least he will think so, probably, once he’s feeling a little less blissfully punched out. Richie’s eyes flick back up to him, and he asks, “Does it look like I had a fuckin’ problem with it _this_ time?”

Eddie laughs out loud, turning and dropping his forehead on top of Richie’s knee. “Okay, smartass.”

“For real, it’s just. Such a sacrifice. Allowing you to fuck me senseless.”

“Oh, my God, shut up—”

“But as I’ve said before, I am an incredibly selfless person, and—”

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie laughs, shoulders shaking. “I hate you so much.”

“Nah, you don’t.”

Eddie kisses his knee again. “No, I don’t.”

On Eddie’s first ever flight to California, he flies in a window seat, and he watches as Lake Erie and Indianapolis and the great endless stretch of nothingness that is the Midwest United States and the Rocky Mountains and the cracked Arizona desert pass beneath him as if pulled away by a conveyor belt, and he flies with Richie’s head on his shoulder, softly snoring the whole way.

He remembers, unbidden, a thought that ran through his mind over and over on that first drive from Manhattan up to a small town in which he’d apparently grown up but was only just remembering, a small town that drove a quivering fear straight down his spine for reasons he was only just beginning to understand. It was three months ago and yet it _still_ feels like it could have been yesterday, or twenty-seven years past.

But the thought kept coming back, like there was a fucking hamster on crack running through a wheel in his brain.

_Out of the blue and into the black._

Yeah. That’s what it was.

Now, as gray-brown mountains roll along the landscape and they pass over what he’s pretty certain is the California state line, he pushes the top corner of his forehead into the window and peers straight ahead at where their plane is chasing a deep red sunset shot through with purple and gleaming yellow, and he thinks:

_Out of the black and into the— something else? Gray-brown? Red? Purple? Purpley-yellow?_

Whatever. He turns away from the window, sneaks a surreptitious glance around the cabin to make sure no one’s looking in his direction, and he kisses the top of Richie’s head.

He’ll figure it out as he goes.

The weird thing is, as slapdash and poorly planned as it is when compared to every other aspect of Eddie’s carefully curated life, getting together is by no means an accident or even entirely unexpected. Kissing Richie is not an accident, moving in with him is not an accident, and the sudden shift when Eddie looks to his future and pictures both of them together through all of it rather than himself, alone, it’s not an accident.

It all sort of feels like fate, as if, even after a twenty-seven-year detour separating them by three thousand miles, they were always going to come back to this. To each other.

At least that’s how Eddie likes to think about it.

Now, the _dog,_ on the other hand.

The dog is very much an accident.

“Eddie, holy shit, Eddie, Eddie, Eddie!”

Richie’s shaking his arm with another loudly stage-whispered _Eddie_ at the end of each shake, and Eddie, in the midst of asking a hostess for a table for three, finally reels on him and asks, “Fucking _what,_ dude? What? What the fuck is your problem?”

But Richie doesn’t tell him what, at least not aloud. Instead he jerks his head in the direction of the restaurant’s outdoor seating, eyes wide and eyebrows up, a conspiratorial smile on his face.

And there, crowding up the entire outdoor seating area, is what seems to be a literal _horde_ of dogs. Puppies, really, of every shape and size, milling about on leashes with a crowd of people in blue polos. There’s three or four pens set up, fencing in a few especially tiny puppies for passersby to pick up and coo over. There’s even one dog literally wheeling around on one of those little custom dog wheelchairs.

“Okay, so… not outdoor seating, then,” Eddie tells the hostess, and Richie groans behind him. “What, Richie? I’m not eating around a bunch of dogs—”

“I’m not saying we should _eat_ out there, man. Look!”

Richie points at the sign someone’s taped up on the glass door that says, alongside about a million hand drawn dog prints and hearts: FUR-EVER FRIENDS RESCUE EVENT - $1 DONATION - PET PUPPIES!

“Really, dude?”

Richie, as if in answer, pulls a twenty dollar bill out of his back pocket — because he does that, stuffs money in his pocket instead of his _wallet_ after it’s out of the ATM — and waves it in Eddie’s face.

“We could pet _twenty_ puppies, man.”

“I’m…” Eddie hesitates. On reflex he was about to say he’s allergic to dogs, but then again, he’s recently learned that he’s not allergic to shellfish or cashews or dairy or gluten, and thanks to a visit to Ben and Bev’s last month, he can be reasonably certain he’s not allergic to dogs, either. “I’m… not sure that’s how it works, dude. There’s probably not even twenty puppies out there.”

“We can pet _one_ puppy, _twenty_ times.”

Eddie holds out for three more seconds before sagging in defeat. “Okay. Yeah. Bill’s probably not even on his way yet, we can go… pet puppies while we wait for him, I guess.”

“That’s the spirit!”

Richie steers him away from the hostess, all but physically dragging him to the door like a hyperactive teenager dragging a parent along. They step out into the outdoor seating area, and Richie tucks his twenty into the donation jar at the first table they pass, waving off the animal shelter volunteer who tries to give him change.

They weave around the fully grown dogs and the little tiny dog with its wheelchair, beelining for the little fenced in pen at the back where the crowd of people is a bit thinner.

“Okay,” Eddie admits, “yeah, they’re cute.”

In the pen there are four puppies, no more than five or six pounds a piece, stumbling over each other with their awkward gangly limbs and too-big paws. Two of them are doing their damn best to climb the walls of the pen, yipping and yapping at Richie and Eddie the second they’re standing close enough. The other two are busy play fighting, grabbing each other by the ears and falling over their own feet.

Richie immediately reaches in and plucks up the one that’d been scrabbling up to reach him, and Eddie tries his best _not_ to act like his entire brain has just gone to static at the sight of Richie cradling this itty bitty ball of black and brown fur in his giant hands.

“Eds, he _chose_ me,” Richie coos, tucking it up under his chin.

“She,” the lady running this pen corrects, smiling as she gently pries apart the two puppies that are still play fighting. The nametag pinned to her bright blue polo says Cheryl.

 _“She_ chose me,” Richie says, scratching behind the puppy’s ears. It’s unfairly adorable how quickly the little thing accustoms to being cradled to his chest, nuzzling under his chin. It tries to nip at his earlobe and Richie laughs out loud, leaning his head back and out of the reach of its puppy teeth. “Easy there, cutie. That’s Eddie’s job.”

Eddie huffs a laugh, shaking his head, and he leans in and gently kneads the top of the puppy’s baseball sized head with his fingertips. She’s… yeah, okay, she’s actually unfairly cute.

“You know,” Cheryl says, and the next words out of her mouth _immediately_ make Eddie decide that she is his new mortal enemy. “They’re all up for adoption.”

Richie’s jaw drops. “Eds.”

“No.”

“Eddie.”

“Nope.”

“Eds.”

“Absolutely not.”

_“Eds.”_

“Richie, she is very cute, but I don’t want a puppy. _No,_ don’t—” Eddie starts to argue, because he set himself up and he knows it, but Richie’s way ahead of him.

 _“What about what I want!”_ Richie cries in his best impression of Oberyn Martell, which is as startlingly on point as it’s been since they saw that episode three weeks ago in their mad rush to binge the whole series. Eddie had spent an hour ranting about how bullshit that particular character death was while Richie slid around their kitchen in his socks yelling, _You murdered her! You raped her! You killed her children!_ and stabbing an imaginary foe with an imaginary spear. Now Richie lifts the puppy in one hand like it’s the fucking skull in Macbeth, giving her a gentle shake. “What about what I want! Justice, for my _seester,_ and her children!”

Eddie purses his lips to avoid laughing, and he insists, “We don’t even know what kind of dog she is, dude. She could grow too big for our apartment.”

“Oh, come on, _look_ at those eyebrows, Eds, she’s clearly a dachshund mix or something,” Richie argues, looking to Cheryl for back-up. “Right?”

She shrugs. “Well, we actually don’t know yet. We found the whole litter yesterday under a park bench—”

“— they were under a _park bench,_ Eds—”

“— and we haven’t had the chance to do a test, and they’re so young it’s really hard to tell by sight alone. They’re definitely not _purebred_ dachshunds, since their legs are longer, and some of them have different coloring, see? But hey, if you ask me, part dachshund is as good a guess as any until there’s an official test done.”

“See that? Part dachshund’s as good a guess as any until there’s an official test done, Eds.”

“We do not have puppy food, Richie. We do not own a leash. We do not know the first thing about puppy care.”

“That’s what Google’s for!” Richie insists, tilting his head and scratching the puppy under her chin. Then, to Cheryl, he asks, “She have a name yet?”

Cheryl nods. “She sure does! This little cutie’s name is Penny.”

Eddie and Richie both stare at her for a beat, and then Richie doubles over with the puppy still cradled against his chest, his whole body shaking with breathless laughter. “Oh, my God. Oh, my _God,_ that— holy shit—”

“There’s no way, Rich.”

“That is the _funniest—_ Jesus, that’s better than anything I’ve ever said on stage in my entire life,” Richie all but cries. “Holy shit.”

“Oh, my God. We are not going home with a puppy,” Eddie repeats. “And we sure as shit aren’t going home with a puppy named _Penny._ We are going back into the restaurant and we are having dinner with Bill, like we planned, and then we are going home to our puppy-free apartment.”

“Hey, you know, you guys don’t have to make any hasty decisions right now,” Cheryl tells them. “It’s no pressure, and we’ll be here all night. Just keep in mind that we don’t put holds on puppies, so if anyone else decides to adopt her before you guys do, they’ll have first dibs.”

_[ So. ]_

_[ How’s the puppy? ]_

_[ You know, the puppy you absolutely were not adopting under any circumstances ]_

_[ That puppy ]_

Eddie rolls his eyes, leans back in the Uber’s back seat, and responds to Bill with a string of twenty middle finger emojis. Then he glances over at Richie and the lovestruck look on his face, and then down at the six pounds of black and brown fur huddled fast asleep in Richie’s lap, and…

Well, it’s kind of hard to be upset.

“Mayday, Eds! Mayday! Fucking mayday, I underestimated— _get back in there you little—!”_

There’s a grunt of effort from Richie, a splash, and then the unmistakable sound of Penny shaking herself dry from the tip of her nose to the tip of her tail, followed immediately by Richie’s panicked slipping and sliding across the linoleum. At least four bottles of shampoo or conditioner go tumbling across the floor, and that’s a generous estimate.

“Eds!”

Eddie takes his time, sipping at his coffee as he nudges the bathroom door open to find the absolute bedlam that awaits him inside. Richie’s in nothing but a pair of swim trunks, hugging their dog around her middle as he tries and fails to wrestle her back into the tub.

“Penny, baby, darling, light of my life,” Richie pleads with her, grunting between words, manhandling her into the bathtub. She whines, high pitched and dramatic like she’s being dragged to certain death. “Don’t give me that tone, _I_ am perfectly fine with you going the rest of your days smelling like crabs and corn chips. You can blame your dad for this. Your other dad.”

“Hey, we agreed to take turns bathing her,” Eddie says, leaning against the doorframe and taking another sip of his coffee.

“That we did,” Richie pants. “That we did— _come_ on, girl, work with me here!”

“I’m sorry, Rich, is our dachshund puppy giving you a hard time?” Eddie asks, tilting his head and watching as Richie gets splashed in the face with what looks like half a gallon of sudsy bath water by their forty pound puppy. “Are you having trouble giving our _dachshund puppy_ a bath? Is our _dachshund puppy_ too much for you to handle?”

“Oh, that is hil-AR-ious,” Richie cries out in Eddie’s voice, scrunching his face up as he does it. “Hyst-ER-ical!”

Eddie snorts, shaking his head and placing his coffee carefully down on the floor outside the bathroom, and then he rolls up his sleeves on his way toward the tub.

Because he may like busting Richie’s balls, but he’s not about to leave him hanging here. He gets to the edge of the tub and whistles, quick and clean, catching Penny’s attention and causing her to go still _just_ long enough for Eddie to reach down and get a good grip on her collar. Richie lunges, snagging her leash and looping it tight around the bathtub faucet.

Once she realizes she’s effectively trapped, Penny quits fighting so much. Eddie sits on the rim of the tub, scratching her behind the ears as she lets out a sad groan and drops her big clunky head on top of his thigh. She looks up at him with her big brown eyes, those little brown spots mimicking eyebrows to make her look _extra_ baleful— eyebrows she inherited from the twenty-five percent of her genes that originated, not from a dachshund as originally assumed, but from a fucking Rottweiler.

The other seventy-five percent? Lab, boxer, and _Great fucking Dane._

Yeah. They’re gonna be in their nineties and Richie’s still not gonna be hearing the end of that one.

“Eddie, my love, you are a _fucking_ godsend,” Richie breathes now, sitting on his ass inside the tub with his legs bracketing Penny’s paws from behind. He reaches up with his sudsy hands and gives her a good scrubbing on her sides. “And Penny, baby, you know I could never stay mad at you. Just please don’t rip any of those noxious farts in my face and you’ll be getting like, a whole pile of rotisserie chicken after this. The whole breast, just for you. Scout’s honor.”

The morning Richie tells him, Eddie already knows something’s up well before he opens his mouth.

He’s just gotten back from an early morning run with Penny in tow, and Richie’s awake and in the kitchen when they come inside even though it’s only eight in the morning. Up and writing already, sitting at the kitchen island with his laptop in front of him, a steaming mug of coffee beside the keyboard that he has yet to touch. He’s tense, Eddie can see it, all that tension sitting in the line of his bare shoulders spreading out from beneath that tank top he wore to bed, but he doesn’t offer up any explanation as to why.

Eddie doesn’t push him. He circles around him and kisses the back of his head, ruffling the overgrown hairs at the back of his neck until Richie loosens up a bit. Then he sets about refilling Penny’s water bowl and scooping out a giant helping of kibble for her breakfast.

Penny’s already wolfed through half her meal and Eddie’s about halfway through chugging his post-run orange juice straight out of the bottle by the time Richie finally sighs and leans back in his seat, pushing his glasses up to rub at his eyes.

“I think—” he starts to say, then wrinkles his nose in a cringe, and tries again. Drops his hand and drums his fingers on the countertop.

Eddie waits, leaning against the fridge, orange juice jug hanging by the neck from one hand. 

“I think I wanna come out.”

“Yeah?”

Richie nods, thousand yard stare unwavering around the general area of the coffee maker. “Like. Publicly.”

Eddie nods and then says, carefully, “Okay.”

Because he’d figured that much. Everyone who matters already knows, after all, him and the rest of the Losers, along with Richie’s agent. All that’s really left is the public.

The same is true for Eddie, technically. While he has yet to say the actual words aloud, all of his friends and even his coworkers know that he’s with Richie, that he and Richie live together and sleep together and have a fucking dog together, that he’s in love with Richie and has been for just about as long as he can remember. The rest of the pieces, as far as Eddie’s concerned, can fall wherever they need to.

Even if he accidentally becomes Twitter famous for being _Richie Tozier’s boyfriend._

“Well, you know I’m behind you, Rich. Whenever you wanna do it. However you wanna do it.”

As Eddie lifts the orange juice for another gulp, Richie nods again. He gives a nervous little half laugh and says, “Actually, yeah, that’s— that’s the thing. I think I… kinda wanna come out on stage?”

Eddie chokes. The sharp tang of orange juice hits the back of his throat the wrong way, and he smacks his fist into his own chest while he coughs up the droplets that have invaded his airway. Richie, staring, opens his mouth and shuts it several times like a fish out of water.

Then he asks with a nervous half-smile, “That bad, huh?”

Eddie holds up a finger that says _wait, asshole, I didn’t say anything yet,_ while he coughs and grunts and clears the last residual bits of acid out of his throat, his face buried in the crook of his arm. Penny pads her way across the kitchen and nudges his leg with her nose, quietly concerned. “I just—” he coughs again, maybe the last time, he’s not sure— “I didn’t… expect that. You’re—” okay, fine, one more cough— “You’re sure? That’s… That’s how you want to do it?”

Richie chews on his bottom lip for a second, then nods. He doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t crack a joke or wax poetic about some dumb shit that doesn’t matter or anything.

And that’s how Eddie knows he’s serious. He pats Penny’s head to let her know he’s alright, and then he takes a slow breath and says, “Okay.”

Richie blinks. “Okay?”

“Yeah,” Eddie shrugs. “Steve’s already working on your tour dates, right? Can you have him forward them to me? We want to make sure we stick to mostly left-leaning cities at first, that’s for sure. All the big cities in California, New York, Philly, those are all fine. No deep south, obviously, except maybe Atlanta if we’re careful about it. And how’s your material looking? Do you know how you’re gonna bring it up? ‘Cause I think the biggest issue is making sure it’s still funny and still, like, _you,_ that way the audience is focusing on the comedy and not so much on the coming out itself, and—”

“Eds,” Richie interrupts, eyes as wide as ever behind the glasses. “You’re not gonna try and talk me out of it?”

Eddie frowns, tilts his head. “Uh. No? If that’s how you wanna do it, then that’s how you wanna do it.”

The smile on Richie’s face is small, tentative, but it’s one of those soft sappy smiles that Eddie loves to put there.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, dummy,” Eddie tells him, capping the orange juice and turning away from that smile to place the bottle back in the fridge. “All I give a shit about is that you do it the way you want, and you’re happy, and most importantly, that you’re safe. I mean, Richie, you’re dating a risk analyst—”

 _“Reformed_ risk analyst—”

“God, you say that like I was a fucking convict. My job is still technically in risk assessment, you know that, it’s just for nonprofits this time around,” Eddie reminds him, letting the fridge door swing shut. “And the point is, just, you know, let me do my job. You’re dating someone who watches out for pitfalls and minimizes risk for a living, and I love you, and I want to take care of you, so just. Fucking take advantage of it for once.”

Richie toasts Eddie with his coffee mug. “Sir, yes, sir.”

“Oh, I am already so fucking on board for this.”

“You,” Eddie says, gently tugging at the knot until it’s nice and snug against Richie’s wrist, “were on board with this a week ago when you first mentioned it.”

 _“Eh._ Yeah, but,” Richie squints, head turned toward him against the pillow, feather-soft black hair splayed out over white linen. “Pretty sure you were the one that mentioned it first, Eds.”

Eddie hums in faux agreement, peppering kisses from Richie’s bound wrist down the length of his forearm. He pauses to nip at the sensitive skin at the crook of his elbow, rewarded instantly by the way Richie shudders and tenses his arms, the headboard creaking a bit when he pulls at the tie. With his lips still a hair’s breadth from Richie’s skin, Eddie says, “Awfully brave of you, getting into semantics with the guy that’s got you tied to the bed.”

Richie lets out a laugh that’s all breath. “Well, what can I say, ‘bout time I took a turn being the brave one.”

“You were always brave,” Eddie murmurs, sucking a bruise into the dip of Richie’s bicep and smiling against his skin when it makes Richie pull in a sharp gasp. The headboard creaks again, and Eddie asks, “How is it? Too tight?”

“No, sir.”

“Ooh, calling me _sir,_ now.”

“You know it. I’m in showbizz, baby, I gotta get into character.”

Eddie laughs, shaking with it as he presses firmer kisses over Richie’s shoulder and makes his way up his neck. He gets one hand on the opposite side of Richie’s face, thumb stroking over his cheekbone, and whispers into the curve behind his jaw, “You sure it’s good? You gotta tell me if it’s too tight, I can loosen it up.”

“Eds,” Richie breathes, smiling wide and trembling all over. “It’s— yep, it’s good. Long as you don’t mind sparing one of your million and a half ties, Mister Businessman.”

 _“Two_ of my million and a half ties, thank you,” Eddie corrects, shooting a look over at Richie’s other wrist, which is bound just as snugly to the opposite end of the headboard. Navy blue silk against pale skin.

“Mm. Right, right, two,” Richie nods, eyes closed and his head tipped back against the pillow. Eddie wonders if he’s purposely doing that to expose more of his throat, and he realizes pretty quickly that he totally is. There’s lots of space there that has yet to be kissed, and he and Richie are nearly always in agreement on how much of it _should_ be kissed at any given time. “Brain’s a little preoccupied here, Eds.”

“Well, to answer your question, smartass, yes, I can spare them,” Eddie says, lifting up onto his knees and swinging a leg over to straddle Richie’s waist. “Especially for this.”

He sinks down, leaning back and appreciating the view: Richie, wearing nothing but his boxers, muscles tensing and releasing all along his arms as he flexes his fingers, testing the give — or lack thereof — on the ties. His hair’s a dark halo around his pink-tinged face, breath coming in quivering little sighs, lips parted, blue-gray eyes raking over Eddie from top to bottom. There’s a hunger in that look, a hunger that pings at something in the center of Eddie’s chest and zips right down to his groin.

“God, Rich, I could just sit here and watch you like this all day.”

And it’s absolutely true, he could. Something tells him Richie wouldn’t even mind it, up to a certain extent. Lying here tied down with Eddie straddling his waist is apparently already doing plenty for him, if the hard press of his dick against the back of Eddie’s thigh is any indication.

“Mm. Like watching you, too, you sexy little blur, you,” Richie says, grinning wide. “Think you might be a little overdressed, though, babe.”

“I will get undressed when I want to get undressed, and not a second earlier,” Eddie tells him in no uncertain terms, and he makes a show of rolling up his sleeves, nice and slow and exaggerated so even Richie with his fucking atrocious eyesight can tell what he’s doing. “This is about you, remember? And from where I’m sitting, _you’re_ the one that’s overdressed.”

He hooks a finger over the waistband of Richie’s boxers, lightly tugging and then releasing, grinning when it elicits a needy little whine from him. Then he leaves the boxers as they are and trails his fingers up the curve of Richie’s stomach, nails lightly scraping on his way up toward his chest, combing through the little curly-ques carpeting his skin there. Richie whines again, so low that it sounds like he tried to hold it back and failed, and he arches up into Eddie’s hand.

It’s not long before Eddie _has_ to give in to the temptation to rock forward and land with his elbows bracketing Richie’s head, kissing him full on the mouth. Richie arches into that, too, so Eddie tangles his fingers in his hair and tugs until Richie’s mouth opens with a little choked _“Guh,”_ and he drags his teeth over Richie’s bottom lip before turning his attention to his throat.

“You’re so—” Eddie whispers, biting at the tender skin under his jaw, speaking without really meaning to— “so fucking hot.”

“Speak for yourself, man,” Richie answers, voice strained.

Eddie leaves another bite an inch or so lower, but he smoothes that one over with his tongue and kisses it after, too. At the next bite, Richie bucks up against him with another whine, desperately seeking friction and finding none of it, so he tries again. And again. And again.

“Ah, ah, ah,” Eddie scolds, pinning Richie’s waist down with his own hips. He even hooks his ankles over Richie’s legs for good measure. “Getting ahead of yourself, aren’t you?”

“Eds,” Richie says, drawing it out with a whine, _Eeeeds._ “Please? Pretty, pretty please?”

“Mm, I dunno,” Eddie hums, tightening his grip on Richie’s hair so he lets out a punched out little noise and stops moving. His mouth falls open, lips swollen and damp, and Eddie whispers into them, “Keep saying please, though, maybe it’ll convince me.”

“Oh, I… I’ve created a monster,” Richie huffs, eyes half-lidded and staring up at him. “You’re enjoying this way too much, you fuckin’ _tease.”_

“Think I’m enjoying it exactly the right amount, actually.”

“C’mon, I’m dying here, man,” Richie whines, twisting his wrists against the ties and getting absolutely nowhere with it. He thrusts his hips up again, but Eddie keeps him held down just fine. “I can’t believe— _ohh, okay—”_

Eddie hums, pulling at Richie’s earlobe with his teeth. “Sure you want me to stop what I’m doing?”

“I never— _ooh man, please—_ never said that, Eds…”

“Well,” Eddie murmurs, shimmying back to kiss down Richie’s neck and bite at the skin just above his collarbone, his hands feeling up Richie’s sides as he goes down, down, down. “What _do_ you want, then?”

“I— I want—” Richie chokes out, throwing his head back, “I want to touch you—”

“Mm, too fucking bad,” Eddie says into his skin, wedging a hand under Richie’s back so he can drag his nails down, all the way down to palm his ass and lift his hips, kissing his stomach as he does. “You’re all mine right now. Gonna have to pick something else.”

“I, uh…” Richie bucks up against him again, and his Adam’s apple bobs with a gulp. “I want… God, I want _you,_ man, whatever the fuck you— I just— I want you. I want your—” he whines, shudders— “your mouth and your hands and your dick and— and all of it. All of it. Please.”

Eddie nods, crawls up Richie’s body, kisses his way up his chest, kisses up the column of his throat, bites at his earlobe again. Then he gets himself settled on his elbows and knees, sinks all of his weight against Richie, every inch of them pressed together from hips to chest to shoulders, and Richie lets out a trembling sigh and melts into the bed. Eddie kisses his ear again, positioning his lips right where Richie will be able to hear him best.

 _“What about what I want?”_ Eddie whispers as dramatically as possible, in what is definitely a dogshit impression of the dude from Game of Thrones, but it’s so fucking stupid that it immediately makes Richie laugh so hard that his legs lift up off the bed.

“Fuck, dude, I— I love you so much,” Richie cries, red in the face, turning his head to muffle his laughs against his own upper arm, cheeks straining and eyes squeezed shut. “I love you so fucking much, I swear to— _oh, God, please—”_

“Mm,” Eddie smiles, lifting his palm away from Richie’s dick to hook his fingers over the waistband again. “What?”

“Oh, God, Eds, please—”

“Say please one more time.”

 _“Please,_ Eds—”

Eddie leans back and tugs Richie’s boxers down, watching with hungry eyes of his own as Richie’s dick springs back against his stomach, and then he pulls the boxers carefully all the way down and off of him, flinging them into the corner of the room. He nudges Richie’s legs aside so he can kneel comfortably between them, bending down to kiss at his waist.

“Happy birthday, Rich,” he whispers into his skin.

“Mm-hmm, happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy _bu-hirth-day, Jesus H. Christ on a fucking stick—!”_

Richie says the words out loud, to someone outside of the losers, to someone outside of Eddie, to someone outside of their empty one-bedroom apartment, for the first time in his entire forty years of life.

And he does it in _Radio City Fucking Music Hall._

Into a microphone. In front of hundreds of people. In the first ten minutes of his new show.

Eddie’s standing off in the wings, hidden from view of the audience by several sets of thick red curtains, but he’s got a full uninterrupted view of Richie bounding around the stage like the world’s lankiest hyperactive child. Richie’s wearing a blazer specifically designed to keep sweat stains from showing even under bright-as-fuck stage lights, and Eddie thinks he might be sweating enough for the both of them anyway. Eddie’s got his arms crossed with one hand gripping his opposite bicep so hard it _hurts_ and his heart hammering in his throat and his breath frozen in his lungs and a wastebasket right beside his feet in case Richie comes sprinting off the stage to nervous-puke.

They planned this. Meticulously. Sold-out venue, mostly liberal city audience, a fanbase that’s looking for something new _anyway_ according to Richie’s manager, which Eddie couldn’t give a single flying fuck about but it at least means they’re just as likely to love him for it as they are to— well, to _not_ love him for it.

Eddie watches, and he waits, and Richie drops the lines like he’s practiced so many times, like it’s nothing, like it’s no big deal.

“And then my boyfriend, you know, I have this boyfriend, he— oh!”

_Sheepish smile, quick laugh, hand on your stomach._

“My bad, guys! Did I not mention that? Right, yeah, big ol’ homo up here. I was getting to that, eventually, but that’s not really the point of the story—”

Eddie keeps holding his breath. There’s a single solitary woop from the audience, one that doesn’t even sound like it’s coming from the rest of the Losers Club all seated in the front row.

Richie immediately picks up on it, because of course he does. He works an audience. It’s his _job._

“Yeah, go ahead, woo! I’m super duper gay! I know what most of you guys are thinking, you’re like, ‘Huh? What? I came here to see a sad old straight dude complain about all the chicks he’s banging! I didn’t sign up to see this old four-eyes Gonzo-looking motherfucker come out at forty fuckin’ years old like gay people are a _new thing_ or something.’ I know that’s what my fuckin’ manager’s thinking right now, probably bursting a blood vessel in the back room of this lovely establishment as we speak, but guess what? It’s _my_ show! So nananana booboo—”

He leans in and blows a long, drawn out fart noise into the microphone, and it’s drowned out about halfway through by a round of applause and laughter that starts off slow and gradually builds into a fucking _roar_ of cheers and hollers and whistles, in the midst of which Eddie can definitely pick out a couple of whoops that distinctly belong to Ben and Mike.

Eddie releases his breath.

Richie grins at the audience with his eyes shining in a way that Eddie really hopes they cannot quite see from a distance.

“Okay, okay, I get it, the gays are great, you guys are so woke, now shut the fuck up and let me talk about my super hot boyfriend that—” he points at the whole audience in a sweeping motion, wiggles a little bit like a bobblehead— _“none_ of you assholes get to sleep with! He picked this—” and he points at himself— “over all of you! Ha! Who’s laughing now?”

He barrels directly from that into a bit about going to the gym (“because I go to a _gym_ now,” he says, like the gym is some magical mystical place he’d never known was real until Eddie dragged him into one) and, in open defiance of all of Eddie’s objections, the vast majority of his jokes are centered on how much better looking Eddie is than him.

Eddie had relented, eventually, to Richie’s technically valid point that he needed to maintain _some_ of his old humor, and that self-deprecation is kind of an automatic laugh with most audiences.

“People don’t even believe we’re dating! They do not fucking believe it! This motherfucker struts up to the gym front desk like a pocket-sized Adonis, and the Gym Gatekeeper or whatever the fuck they’re called, they’re like—” he drops into his British Butler Voice, hunches over and motions like he’s waving someone along— _“very good, sir, welcome back to this supreme bastion of physical health and fitness, sir, please, right this way, sir, and if you don’t mind my asking, who is this strange sweaty homeless man following in behind you, sir?”_

The audience erupts at that, and Eddie can’t help laughing a bit, too.

Richie segues easily from that into a bit about gym locker rooms, which includes a very crude moment where he props one shoe up on the stool they’ve provided for him and mimes like he’s blow drying his own balls, and the audience loves that, too.

They love _him._

It’s easy, after that, for Eddie to relax incrementally and watch the rest of the show. Richie looks less nervous than he’d looked at the beginning — the applause, evidently, will do that — but Eddie can still see it in the set of his shoulders, the way he keeps switching the microphone from hand to hand.

Eddie gets it. Even though this is a big moment, and he is so beyond proud of Richie for doing this the way he wanted to, it’s still scary. Even though Eddie’s therapist has long since talked him down from running hate crime statistics in his head on an endless loop, it’s still scary. Even though Richie never namedrops him (despite Eddie giving him explicit permission to do so, because really, his name’s gonna get out eventually _anyway),_ it’s still scary.

They’re still going to be escorted right from here into an SUV belonging to a driving service that Eddie hand selected from a heavily researched list, and that SUV is going to take them directly to a restaurant all the way down in Brooklyn to make it a little less likely they’ll run into anyone who was at the show tonight. Or, at least, anyone other than the losers, who’ll also be meeting them there for celebratory after-show drinks.

It’s scary, but— also scary in a good way. Exhilarating. Freeing.

There’s a joke in there somewhere, Eddie thinks, about them going for _regular scary_ this time. He doesn’t care enough to bring it to its proper punchline, and anyway, that’s mostly Richie’s forté.

At the end of the show, Richie smiles and waves and hooks the mic back into the stand, and he walks off the stage with carefully measured strides and with an absolutely fucking _wild_ uproar of applause at his back. Eddie can’t even hear Ben and Mike over the noise anymore, but he hears a whistle that might come from Bill.

Richie looks a little green around the gills, but he does not go for the wastebasket.

“Pocket-sized Adonis. Really,” Eddie asks, totally deadpan. “You didn’t fucking include _that_ in your practices, you fucking dickhead.”

Richie laughs, more than a little teary-eyed, and Eddie immediately breaks. He leans up and wraps his arms around Richie’s shoulders, gets a hand on the back of his head, and lets Richie squeeze the fuck out of his ribs and tuck his very sweaty tear-streaked face into his neck.

“Holy shit,” Richie whispers, his voice breaking. _“Fuck,_ I actually— I actually fucking did that.”

“Yeah, Rich. You did. You did it.”

_“Fuck.”_

“Hey,” Eddie says, pressing a firm kiss to the side of his head, letting it linger there. “I’m proud of you, okay? I’m really, really proud of you. You did great. It was a _great_ fucking show. Seriously, I think I might have laughed once. Maybe even _twice.”_

Richie shakes, laughing and crying at the same time. “I love you so fucking much, Eds.”

“Yeah, I love you, too, you old, four eyes, Gonzo-looking motherfucker.”

Precisely eleven months, one week, and three days after Eddie’s return from the dead, he steps into a ritsy little wedding venue in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and it takes him less than four seconds to realize that Richie’s tie is off center.

“Oh, my God, _how_ did you mess it up again already? I fixed it _in_ the Uber over here. Jesus. Come here.”

Richie shrugs one shoulder, allowing Eddie to pull him by the lapels of his suit — slate gray over a seafoam green shirt, chosen after a series of relentless vetoes from Bev over Skype until she declared this ensemble the unequivocal winner — and right up into his personal space. “That was like, forever ago, man.”

“It was ten minutes ago, you fucking animal.”

“What can I say, Eds? Ties don’t agree with me,” Richie sighs, then tilts his head and winks. “Well. Sometimes they do.”

Eddie rolls his eyes, ignoring the flush that creeps into his cheeks as he straightens Richie’s tie, and once that’s done he gently smoothes over the lapels of his suit. God, he’s ridiculous. He’s fucking ridiculous. “You’re fucking ridiculous, you know that?”

“Mm, that’s exactly what your—”

“Eddie!”

Both of them turn, watching as a very harried Adrian Mellon comes rushing into the foyer from one of the venue’s back rooms. He’s wearing a cream-colored suit, the top button of his shirt undone and his tie hanging untied from his neck like a scarf, but he doesn’t seem to notice or care.

“Resurrection buddy! You made it,” Adrian says when he reaches them, immediately going for a fist bump and then pulling Eddie into a quick, tight hug. “And you— holy shit, your plus one is _actually_ Richie Tozier, I thought you were fucking with me on the invite. What’s up, man? Adrian.”

Richie goes for a handshake and is pulled into a hug anyway, and he blinks, bewildered for a second before he pats Adrian’s back. “Uh, yeah. Hi. I’m Richie.”

“How you feeling?” Eddie asks, eyeing Adrian up and down when they pull apart. He looks like a guy who’s either about to run outside and take a dive into the ocean or go upstairs and scream into a pillow, but he looks… happy, Eddie thinks. “No pre-wedding jitters?”

“Oh, God, don’t talk to me about it,” Adrian huffs, fanning his face. “I swear I literally almost _never_ cry, like, I’m not a crier. That’s usually Donnie’s thing, but I cried four times today, and I promise I’m gonna cry during the vows, and I’m like _this_ close right now. Jesus. It’s just— a lot. Happy crying, you get it.”

“Sure,” Eddie says, even though he doesn’t, not really. Not like he happy-cried at his own wedding.

“Oh, _sure_ he gets it,” Richie says as he slings an arm around Eddie’s shoulders. “Eds is a big crier, man, just waterworks all the fuckin’ time.”

Eddie rolls his eyes and shoves him off, shaking his head. “I am _not,_ that’s you. You’re projecting, asshole.”

“Eh. Maybe,” Richie shrugs. “Say, Adrian, there a bathroom in this place? Gonna take a leak before the ceremony.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s just down that hall and to the left.”

“Awesome,” Richie says, then ducks down to peck a little kiss to Eddie’s cheek. “See you in there?”

“I won’t save you a seat,” Eddie tells him, watching Richie wave dismissively over his shoulder on his way down toward the hallway.

It’s then that Adrian turns toward Eddie, hands on his hips, suddenly leveling him with a _very_ pointed look that’s somehow scolding without edging into harsh.

“What?” Eddie asks. “What did I do?”

“What do you _mean,_ what? Edward Kaspbrak, my own resurrection buddy,” Adrian laments, shaking his head. “We came back to life together. We walked through the sewers together. We led an army of undead children out of those caves together—”

“Holy shit, _why_ would you say it like that?”

“We led an army of undead children out of those caves together,” Adrian doubles down, “and we went to the hospital together, and then we talked about alien killer clowns over coffee together, and I invited you to my wedding, and in all that time you never once thought to mention that Donnie and I were _not,_ as previously assumed, the only two gay guys in that entire shithole town? You wait ‘til my wedding and show up with _that_ tall glass water as your plus one? Huh?”

Right. Duh. Eddie opens his mouth, then closes it, then opens it again.

“I didn’t… know? At the time?”

“Eddie, honey, no offense, but there is literally zero chance you didn’t know I was gay. No one is that oblivious, not even in fucking Derry.”

“No, yeah, I know that, I mean I didn’t… know that… I was.”

“You—?” Adrian’s jaw drops, and he lets out a breath, placing a hand on his chest. “Oh, my God. Like, this past year?”

Eddie nods, smiling a bit in spite of himself.

“Oh, my God!” Adrian cries, pulling him into another bone crushing hug. The kid’s got some fucking muscle on him, that’s for sure. “Oh, my God,” Adrian says again, pulling away from the hug but keeping his hands on Eddie’s upper arms. He looks like he’s about to make good on his promise to start crying, but only just. “You know what? No, that one’s on me. I should have kept in touch better, _Eddie,_ I cannot believe I missed out on the chance to be your gay sensei. You could have been my gay Padawan!”

Eddie laughs, shaking his head. “It’s not that big a deal.”

“Not that—? Okay, look, I’m not gonna go making a huge thing out of it if it makes you uncomfortable, but Eddie,” Adrian says, eyes wide and beseeching and deadly serious. “Take it from somebody whose fiancé couldn’t even say the word ‘gay’ until we were together for over a year. After growing up in that soul-sucking place, getting to where you’re at now is a big fucking deal, okay? Own that shit. You’re a badass, and not even because you helped murder an otherworldly horror movie monster. Seriously.” He pats Eddie’s arm. “I’m super fucking proud of you, dude.”

“I—” Eddie gulps down the sudden lump in his throat, and then says, “Husband, actually.”

“Huh?”

“Your husband,” Eddie says. “Not your fiancé. Might as well get used to saying it now, it’s gonna be true in about an hour.”

Adrian’s jaw drops. “Oh, sure! Fucking turn it around on me and make _me_ cry! Why not!”

He laughs, smacking Eddie in the shoulder and then wiping at his own eyes.

“Fucking hell, I’m gonna run through every box of tissues we have in this place. There’s gonna be none left for Donnie, we’re just gonna have to throw him in the ocean or something. God, go find a seat for you and your arms-for-days boyfriend, you asshole. Go. Vanish. I refuse to speak to you again until I’m married and have, like, three drinks in my system, minimum. Go.”

“So.”

Eddie takes a sip of his drink, some kind of overly sweet coconut rum monstrosity that he ordered from the open bar on a whim, and he asks, “So?”

Richie’s already pulled his tie loose enough that he could get away with unbuttoning the top two buttons of his shirt, which is _so_ unfairly attractive, and he drums a little rhythm with his thumbs on Eddie’s shins, since they’re kicked up over his lap and in easy reach. “So, where’s this wedding rank on the list of weddings you’ve been to, huh?”

“Oh, number one, for sure,” Eddie answers without hesitation. “Better than mine, obviously.”

Richie snorts. “Figured that much.”

“Yeah, I never would’ve even _thought_ about a beach wedding, I mean, all that sand?” Eddie asks, rolling his glass around on the table. “But it was fucking perfect.”

“Tell me about it. At this point I’m just waiting on Ben and Bev to show it up with whatever over-the-top bullshit they’re gonna pull for _their_ wedding.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Eddie says, already picturing it. “What the hell’s taking them so long, anyway?”

“Right? Beats me, dude!” Richie says, throwing his hands up and then returning them to Eddie’s shins, his thumb idly moving back and forth over the fabric of his pants. “You know, I feel like we look like a couple of old losers over here.”

“We are old,” Eddie points out, “and we are losers.”

“Yeah, but I mean,” Richie shrugs, pointing with a nod at the cluster of Adrian’s and Don’s friends and family all swaying around on the dance floor. The couple’s first dance has long since passed, along with the dance between Adrian’s mother and Don, and the dance between Don’s older sister and Adrian, so now it’s just a free-for-all. “Kinda feels like we should do a _little_ dancing, right?”

Eddie thinks that over for a second, then knocks back the last little gulp of his drink and plunks the glass down on the table. “Sure.”

“What— really?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, already taking his legs off Richie’s lap and standing, offering his hand out. “Just don’t ask me to do the fucking Cupid Shuffle or the Cha Cha Slide because I would _literally_ rather die. Again.”

Richie takes his hand and lets Eddie pull him to his feet, and together they weave around the chairs and tables situated in a ring around the dance floor.

“So how do we…?”

Before Richie can even finish the question, Eddie places Richie’s left hand up on his shoulder, fitting his own right hand at Richie’s waist. “I would’ve said you should lead, since you’re taller,” Eddie says, “but I also know you don’t have any idea what the fuck you’re doing, so I guess it’s up to me.”

Richie laughs, letting Eddie push and pull him around the dance floor to the tune of whatever songs pop up on the playlist. Sometimes he steps on Eddie’s toes, and sometimes they come dangerously close to bowling over another pair of dancers, but for the most part, it’s nice. It’s really nice, being this close to Richie and just fucking around like this in public. Eddie tries to imagine, for a moment, whether either of them would have been willing to do something like this in front of other people a year ago, and he realizes there’s not a chance in hell. Even after they first got together.

 _After growing up in that soul-sucking place,_ Adrian’s voice rings in his head, _getting to where you’re at now is a big fucking deal, okay?_

The track switches over, some newer song Eddie doesn’t recognize, but one that has a nice slow beat to it. The rest of the dancers on the floor slow down, some of them trickling back to the open bar and back to their tables, others pairing up and pressing closer to slow dance like a bunch of dumb hormonal teenagers at their high school prom.

Richie wastes no time, pulling Eddie in close and wrapping his arms around him, and Eddie doesn’t complain.

Eventually, after who knows how long swaying back and forth, Richie whispers into his hair, “Have I mentioned how happy I am that you’re here, Eds?”

“You’re _my_ plus one, dude.”

“Yeah,” Richie nods, Eddie feels his chin move with it. “But not… _here,_ here. I mean, like, here. Alive. You know.”

Eddie hums in agreement, trailing a hand up under Richie’s suit jacket to stroke along the line of his back, and he presses his cheek to Richie’s chest, smelling nothing but cologne and sweat and the coconut rum Richie spilled on himself earlier. “Yeah,” he finally answers. “I know. You’ve mentioned once or twice.”

Richie kisses the top of his head and leaves his face there. “I mean, it’s… It’s like what Don said, you know? In his vows? There was a bit there where I lived in this, like, _infinitely_ shittier world that didn’t have you in it anymore, and I just…” he sighs, kisses Eddie’s head again, gives his upper back a squeeze. “I don’t know what the fuck I would’ve done, man.”

For a long while Eddie says nothing to that. He just keeps up their slow rhythmic swaying, keeps stroking along Richie’s spine, keeps turning his head to press the occasional kiss to the center of Richie’s chest.

“I don’t know, I’m picturing a real classic crash and burn,” Eddie finally answers. “You probably would have, like, given away all your worldly possessions and became a forest hermit or something.”

Richie barks a surprised laugh. “Yeah? Why you say that?”

“I am your entire impulse control, dude.”

“Oh, yeah, no, of course. You’re totally right. If you weren’t around I probably would have done something really impulsive, you know, like adopting a puppy within an hour of meeting her, or coming out on fucking stage in front of thousands of people _and_ a Netflix camera crew.”

Eddie pauses for a beat. “I never said I was _effective_ impulse control.”

Richie laughs again, all happy and casual, but under Eddie’s ear can hear Richie’s heart beating faster before he says, “So… you know, speaking of things people do on impulse.”

“Oh, I cannot fucking wait to hear this,” Eddie mumbles.

“Yeah, I mean. We’ve never really… talked about this, or anything,” Richie says, then pauses. “But would you—? How would you feel about getting married again?”

Eddie is very, very careful not to miss a step, but it’s a near thing. He pulls back a bit, just enough to peer up at Richie with his eyebrows probably halfway up his forehead.

“Hypothetically,” Richie’s quick to add.

“Oh, right, hypothetically,” Eddie snorts, shaking his head and smiling. Richie immediately unfurls one arm from around his shoulders to poke at his dimple, prompting another laugh before Eddie swats him away and returns to their slow dance formation. Then Eddie presses his cheek to Richie’s chest again and tucks his head under his chin, not really giving a shit about proper dance formation and just… moving, back and forth. A rhythmic hug. “Hard to say anything bad about marriage after that ceremony, huh?”

The deflection is pretty standard, and as the resident expert in deflection, Richie has to notice. Instead of interrupting, Richie just nods, then gently shoves Eddie into a twirl that they only _kind_ of fuck up — it gets Eddie laughing again, anyway, which was probably the intention — before they’re back with their arms around each other.

“But… yeah, I don’t know,” Eddie continues. “I feel like I messed it up pretty bad the first time around, but now I’m getting better at, like, doing things I want. Letting myself want things in the first place. Might be nice to get another shot at… at doing it right, you know?”

Richie takes in a quick breath. Not quite a gasp, but close.

“Hypothetically,” Eddie adds.

“Oh, yeah, yeah, hypothetically, of course.”

Eddie does not need to lean back and look at Richie to see his atrocious attempt at a poker face, because he already knows it’s there. Instead he just rolls his eyes and smiles, and keeps swaying to the music.

“I mean, pump the brakes, Kaspbrak,” Richie murmurs. “It’s only been a year. What kind of girl do you think I am?”

Eddie’s cheeks hurt from laughing but he does it again anyway, unable to help it. He peels himself out of the comfortable warmth of Richie’s arms to shove _him_ into a twirl, yanking him back and then twirling him again as the music switches over to another pop song that Eddie still does not recognize, and Richie moves right along with him.

He’s not gonna worry about it. He’s alive and healthy and happy, and he’s with Richie, and they’re together and they’re gonna _keep_ being together, taking Penny for jogs around L.A. and visiting their friends all over the country and annoying the shit out of each other and waking up in bed together and going to weddings together and dancing like a couple of old out-of-touch losers together.

The rest of the pieces, as far as Eddie’s concerned, can fall wherever they need to.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on [tumblr](https://iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid.tumblr.com) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/maturinbabey) if you wanna come scream with me about these adorable idiots


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